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MISCELLANIES 



BY 



WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS. 



SECOND EDITION 



NEW YORK: 
EDWARD H. FLETCHER, 

141 NASSAU STREET. 
1851. 



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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, 

BY EDWARD H. FLETCHER, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District 
of New York. 



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Beri ram Smith 
Mar -934 






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5 



PREFACE. 



The Discourses, Reviews, and Sermons, composing the present volume, 
have, several of them, been already issued separately ; and of the opening 
article, the present is the third edition ; others of them appear now for the 
first time. It was thought, by some of the author's friends, that the book 
might find purchasers ; and the writer will have been recompensed, should 
it please " The Great Taskmaster" to give to the desultory pages aught of 
usefulness, in their influence on the minds of any of their readers. For the 
Bake of its publisher, who is also the proprietor of the copyright, the author 
would hope for the volume sufficient currency to save him from loss in the 
venture he has made. W. R. W. 

New York, Nov. 1, 1849. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 
The Conservative Principle, ------------- 1 

Appendix to the Conservative Principle, -*------ 78 

Ministerial Responsibility ---------••••-91 

The Prayers of the Church needed for her rising Ministry, 111 

The Church the Home and Hope of the Free, ------ 129 

The Strong Staff and the Beautiful Rod, ------- 143 

The Jesuits as a Missionary Order, ---------- i69 

The Life and Times of Baxter, ------------ 194 

Christ a Home Missionary, ------------- 220 

Publications of the American Tract Society, ------ 241 

Increase of Faith necessary to the Success of Christian 

Missions, ------------ ------- 261 

The Preaching of another Gospel accursed, ------- 283 

The Sea giving up its Dead, ------------- 297 

The Lessons of Calamity, -------------- 311 

The Church, a School for Heaven, ---------- 337 

The Prayer of the Church against those delighting in War, 367 

Appendix— The Cagots of France, 383 



THE 

CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

IN OUR LITERATURE. 

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF THE HAM- 
ILTON LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION, MADISON COUNTY, N. Y., 
ON TUESDAY EVENING, JUNE 13, 1843. 



TO 

THE REV. JOHN 8. MAGIMIS, D.D., 

PROFESSOR OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY 
IN THE 

HAMILTON LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION, 

IS, AS A SLIGHT MARK OF HIGH ESTEEM AND AFFECTION, 

INSCRIBED 

BY HIS FRIEND. 

W. R. W. 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF 
THE "CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE," &c. 

Other engagements, which prevented the author from preparing this Address for 
the press, and for a time banished it entirely from his mind, must be, in part, his apol- 
ogy with the Societies who requested its publication, for its late appearance. Yet what 
of truth it may contain is not less true now than at the time of its delivery. Some 
additions made at the commencement of the Address, with regard to the proper defi- 
nition of literature, and the permanent influence which may belong even to its more 
transitory productions, will, he trusts, not be found alien to the theme. But the chief 
cause of delay has been the writer's consciousness how far his treatment of the subject 
fell below the intrinsic importance of the topic. This consciousness, had he not bound 
himself to publish, would have prevented his appearance even at this late hour. 

To prevent misconstruction he would add the remark, that a full review of our 
national literature in all its aspects, the more encouraging as well as the more gloomy^ 
was no part of his design. It was his task to point out certain of the perils, and to 
indicate the sufficient and sole remedy. 



NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 

This Address, originally delivered before the Adelphian and iEonian Societies of 
Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution, has, from its theme, found more ac- 
ceptance than the author had at all anticipated. In preparing a second edition, he has 
subjected the whole to such hasty revision as his other engagements allowed, and 
made some other additions both to the text and notes. 

New York, 1844. 



NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 

The present edition has some slight revisions, and considerable additions have been 
made to some of the notes ; but these additions are, from want of leisure, less exten- 
sive than the writer had wished to make them. 

New York, November, 1849. 



THE CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE IN OUR 
LITERATURE. 

Gentlemen : — In acceding to the request with which 
you have honored me, and which brings me at this time 
before you, I have supposed that you expected it of the 
speaker to present some theme relating to the common- 
wealth of literature ; that commonwealth in which every 
scholar and every Christian feels naturally so strong an 
interest. The studies in which you have here engaged, and 
which in the case of some of you are soon to terminate, 
have taught you the value of sound learning to yourselves 
and its power over others. That love of country, which in 
the bosoms of the young burns with a flame of more than 
ordinary purity and intensity, gives you an additional interest 
in the cause of letters ; for as you well know, the literature 
of the nation must exercise a powerful influence on the 
national destiny. Acting as it does not merely on the 
schools, but also on the homes of a land, it must from those 
fountains send out its waters of healing or of bitterness, of. 
blessing or of strife, over the length and breadth of our 
goodly land. You know that it is not mere physical advan- 
tages that have gained or that can retain for our country its 
political privileges. You have seen how the physical con- 
dition of a people may remain unchanged, whilst the moral 
condition of a people is deteriorating rapidly and fatally. 
You remember that the same sun shone on the same Mara- 
thon, when it was the heritage and the battle-ground of 
freemen ; and when, in later and more disastrous days, it 
re-echoed to the footsteps of the Greek bondsman and his 
Ottoman oppressor. You look to literature, and other 
moral causes, then, as determining to some extent the future 
history of our land. You are aware that literature is not 
always of a healthy character, nor does it in all ages exercise 
a conservative influence. It is like the vegetation of our 



4 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

earth, of varied nature. Much of it is the waving harvest 
that fills our garners and piles our boards with plenty; and, 
alas, much of it has been, like the rank ivy, hastening the 
decay it serves to hide, and crumbling into speedier ruin the 
edifice it seems to adorn and beautify. As lovers of your 
country, you must therefore feel an eager anxiety for the 
moral character of the literature that country is to cherish. 
And of your number most are looking forward to the work 
of the Christian ministry ; and, from the past history of the 
world, you have learned in what mode the progress of liter- 
ature has acted upon that of the gospel, and been, in its turn, 
acted upon ; and to what an extent the pulpit and the press 
have sometimes been found in friendly alliance, and at others 
enlisted in fearful antagonism. How shall it be in your 
times ? 

By the literature of a land, we mean, it is here perhaps 
the place to say, more than the mere issues from the press 
of a nation. The term is generally applied to describe all 
the knowledge, feelings, and opinions of a people as far as 
they are reduced to writing, or published abroad by the art 
of printing. But it may well be questioned whether the 
term does not in justice require a wider application. Lan- 
guage, as soon as it is made the subject of culture, seems to 
give birth to literature. And such culture may exist where 
the use of the press and even of the pen are as yet unknown. 
Savage tribes are found having their poetry ere they have 
acquired the art of writing. Such were the Tonga Islanders, 
as Mariner found them. The melody and rhythm of their 
dialect may have been partially developed, and their bards, 
their musicians, and their orators have become distinguished, 
ere the language has had its grammarians or its historians. 
The nation has thus, in some sort, its literature, ere its 
Cadmus has appeared to give it an alphabet. The old 
Gaelic poetry, on which Macpherson founded his Ossianic 
forgeries, was a part of the nation's literature while yet un- 
written. And if, as some scholars have supposed, the poems 
of Homer were, in the times of the author, preserved by 
memory and not by writing, it would be idle to deny, that, 
even in that unwritten state, and whilst guarded only in the 
recollection of travelling minstrels, they were a glorious and 
influential literature to the Greek people, a KTri^a e$ aei to 
them, and to the civilization of Europe for all ensuing times. 
And even in nations having the use of letters, there is much 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 5 

never written that yet, in strictness, must be regarded as 
forming part of the literature of the people. The unre- 
corded intercourse of a community, neither transcribed by 
the pen, nor multiplied by the press, may bear no inconsid- 
erable part in the literary culture of that people, and form 
no trivial portion of their literary products. Of the elo- 
quence of Curran and Sheridan much was never reported, 
or reported most imperfectly ; and yet in its effects upon 
the immediate hearers in courts of justice or houses of Par- 
liament, deserved the name and honors of literature, alike 
irom the literary culture it displayed on the part of the 
speaker, and from the literary taste it formed and cherished, 
on the part of the auditory. Some of the most distinguished 
among the*living scholars of France were, whilst professors 
in her colleges, eminent for the eloquence of their unwritten 
lectures. Were not even such of those lectures of Guizot, 
Villemain, and Cousin as never reached the press, yet really 
and most effectively contributions to the literature of the 
land ? The departed Schleiermacher of Germany had the 
reputation of being among the profoundest thinkers and the 
most eloquent preachers of his time. His sermons, it is 
said, were never written ; nor were most of the pulpit dis- 
courses of a kindred spirit, Robert Hall, of England. Al- 
though many have been published, more must have perished. 
Yet were not those, which the living voice but published to 
a single congregation, truly a portion of German and British 
literature, as well as those which the press published to the 
entire nation, and preserved to succeeding times 1 Thus the 
arguments of the bar, or the appeals of the pulpit, the float- 
ing proverbs, or the current legends of the nation, and the 
ballads, and even the jests, which no antiquary may as yet 
have secured aud written down, are expressions of the pop- 
ular mind, which though cast only upon the ear, and stored 
only in the memory, instead of receiving the surer guardian- 
ship of the written page, may, w r ith some show of reason, 
be claimed as forming no small and no uninfluential part 
of the popular literature. In this sense, the literature of a 
land embraces the whole literary intercourse of its people, 
whether that intercourse be oral or written. It is the expo- 
nent of the national intellect, and the utterance of the pop- 
ular passions. The term thus viewed, comprises all the 
intellectual products of a nation, from the encyclopedia to 
the newspaper ; from the body of divinity to the primer or 



6 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

the nursery rhyme — the epic poem and the Sunday School 
hymn — the sermon and the epigram — the essay and the 
sonnet — the oration and the street hallad — the jest or the 
bye-word — all that represents, awakens, and colors the pop- 
ular mind — all that interprets, by the use of words, the 
nation to themselves, or to other nations of the earth. 

This literature not only displays the moral and intellectual 
advancement of the people at the time of its production, 
but it exercises, of necessity, a powerful influence in hasten- 
ing or in checking that advancement. It is the Nilometer 
on whose graded scale we read not merely the height to 
which the rushing stream of the nation's intellect has risen, 
or the degree to which it has sunk, but also the character 
and extent of the harvests yet to be reaped in coming 
months along the whole course of those waters. Thus it 
registers not merely the inundations of the present time, but 
presages as well the plenty or sterility of the yet distant 
future. The authors of a nation's literary products are its 
teachers — in truth or in error ; and leave behind their im- 
print and their memorial in the virtues or vices of all those 
whom their labors may have reached. The errand of all 
language is to create sympathy ; to waft from one human 
bosom the feelings that stir it, that they may awaken a cor- 
responding response in other hearts. We are therefore held 
responsible for our words because they affect the happiness 
and virtue of others. The word that drops from our lips 
takes its irrevocable flight, and leaves behind its indelible 
imprint. It is, in the stern language of the apostle, in the 
case of some, a flame " set on fire of hell ;" and consuming 
wherever it alights, it " setteth on fire the course of nature ;" 
as, in the happier case of others, that word is a message of 
salvation, " ministering grace unto the hearers." Reason 
and Scripture alike make it idle to deny the power of speech 
over social order and morality ; and literature is but speech 
under the influence of art and talent. And a w r ritten litera- 
ture is but speech put into a more orderly and enduring form 
than it usually wears. We know that God and man hold 
each of us responsible for the utterance of the heart by the 
lips. Human tribunals punish the slanderer because his 
words affect the peace of society; and the Last Day exacts 
its reckoning for " every idle word," because that word, 
however lightly uttered, was the utterance of a soul, and 
went out to influence, for good or for evil, the souls of others. 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 7 

And if the winged words, heedless and unpremeditated, 
of a man's lips are thus influential, and enter into the matter 
of his final account, it cannot be supposed that these words, 
when fixed by the art of writing, or scattered by the art of 
printing, either have less power over human society, or are 
in the eye of heaven clothed with less solemn responsibili- 
ties. A written literature embalms the perishable, arrests 
the progress of decay, and gives to our words a longer life 
and a wider scope of influence. Such words, so preserved 
and so diffused, are the results, too, of more than ordinary 
deliberation. If malicious, their malice is malice prepense. 
If foolish, their folly is studied, and obstinate, and shame- 
less. The babbler sins in the ears of a few friends, and in 
the privacy of home. The frivolous or vicious write! sins, 
as on a wider theatre, and before the eyes of thousands, 
while the echoes of the press waft his words to distant lands 
and later times. And because much of this literature may 
be hasty and heedless, ludicrous in tone, and careless in 
style, soon to evaporate and disappear, like the froth on 
some hurried stream, we are not to suppose that it is there- 
fore of no practical influence. The English stage, in the 
days of the last two Stuarts, was of a reckless character ; — 
the child of mere whim, the progeny of impulse and license. 
Many of its productions were alike regardless of all moral 
and literary rules — the light-hearted utterance of a depraved 
generation : full of merry falsehoods and jesting blasphemy, 
fantastic and barbarous in style, as well as irreligious in their 
spirit. Yet he must be a careless reader of history, who, 
because of its reckless, trivial, and profligate character, 
assigns to it but a limited influence. It did, in fact, gre- 
viously aggravate the national wickedness whence it sprung. 

The trivial and the ephemeral as they float by, in glittering 
bubbles, to the dull waters of oblivion, may yet work irre- 
parable and enduring mischief ere their brief career ends ; 
and the result may continue, vast and permanent, when the 
fleeting causes which operated have long gone by. Who 
now reads Eikon Basilike, the forgery of Bishop Gauden, 
ascribed to the beheaded Charles I. ? Yet that counterfeited 
manual of devotion is thought by some to have done much 
in bringing back the house of Stuart to the English throne.* 

* " Many have not scrupled to ascribe to that book the subsequent resto- 
ration of the royal family. Milton compares its effects to those which were 
wrought on the tumultuous Romans by Antony's reading to them the will 



8 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

Who in this age knows the words of Lillibullero ? # Yet the 
author of that street ballad, now forgotten, boasted of hav- 
ing rhymed, by his song, the Stuarts out of their kingdom. 
Thus a forged prayer-book aided to restore a dynasty, as the 
ragged rhymes of a street song helped to overturn it. We 
err grievously, therefore, if we suppose that the frivolous is 
necessarily uninfluential, and that when the word passes, its 
effects also pass with it. According to Eastern belief, the 
plague that wastes a city may be communicated by the gift 
of a glove or a riband. The spark struck from the iron 
heel of the laborer may have disappeared ere the eye could 
mark its transient lustre, yet ere it expired have fired the 
train which explodes a magazine, lays a town in ruins, and 
spreads around a wide circuit alarm and lamentation, be- 
reavement and death. Trifles may have no trivial influence. 
What is called the lighter literature of the age may be even 
thus evanescent, yet not inefficacious. By its wide and rapid 
circulation it may act more powerfully on society than do 
graver and abler treatises, and its authors, if unprincipled, 
may thus deserve but too well the title which the indignant 
Nicole gave to the comparatively decorous dramatists and 
romance writers of France, in his own time ; a title which 
his pupil Racine at first so warmly resented, that of "public 
poisoners." 

Of literature, therefore, thus understood, thus wide in its 
range and various in its products, thus influential even where 
the most careless, and thus clothed with most solemn re- 
sponsibilities because of its influence, it is our purpose now 
to speak. 

You perceive, gentlemen, that amongst ourselves, as a 
people, literature is subject to certain peculiar influences, 
perhaps nowhere else found in the same combination, or 
operating to the same extent as in our own land. We are a 
young nation, inhabiting, and called to subdue, a wide terri- 
tory. Youth is the season of hope, enterprise, and energy 
- — and it is so to a nation as well as an individual. Our 

of Caesar. The Eikon passed through fifty editions in a twelvemonth." — 
Hume. 

* "It may not be unworthy of notice, that a merry ballad, called Lillibul- 
lero, being at that time published, in derision of the papists and the Irish, it 
was greedily received by the people, and was sung by all ranks of men, even 
by the King's army, who were strongly seized with the national spirit. This 
incident both discovered, and served to increase the general discontent of 
the kingdom." — Hume. 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 9 

literature is likely, therefore, to be ardent, original, and at 
times perhaps boastful. They are the excellences and the 
foibles of youth. We entered, as by right of inheritance, 
and in consequence of our community of language, upon 
the possession of the rich and ancient literature of Britain, 
at the very outset of our national career. As a people we 
enjoy, again, that freedom which has ever been the indul- 
gent nurse of talent in all times and in all lands. The peo- 
ple are here the kings. And whilst some of our sovereigns 
are toiling in the field, others are speaking through the press. 
Our authors are all royal by political right, if not by the 
birthright of genius. Providence has blessed us with the 
wide diffusion of education, and the school travels, in many 
regions of our land, as it were, to every man's door. It is 
not here, if it may elsewhere be the case, that the neglected 
children of genius can complain that " chill penury repressed 
their noble rage." In addition to the advantages of the 
common school, our writers, publishers, and instructors, are 
sedulously preparing literature for the use of the masses. 
The popular lecturer is discussing themes of grave interest ; 
while the cheap periodical press is snowing over the whole 
face of our land its thick and incessant storm of knowledge. 
This knowledge, it is true, is not all of the most valuable 
kind. The wonders of steam are dragging the remoter por- 
tions of our union daily into closer contact, whilst a free emi- 
gration is bringing us the denizens of other lands, and the 
men of other tongues, until the whole world appears about 
to be made neighbors and kinsmen to America ; and the 
nation seems daily melting into a new and strange amalgam, 
in consequence of the addition of foreign materials from with- 
out, to the heterogeneous mass already found fusing within 
our own country. 

All these causes are operating, and must operate long and 
steadily, upon the character of American literature. It be- 
comes an important inquiry then, what moral shape this lit- 
erature is assuming under these plastic influences. You 
ask, as change succeeds change, and as one omen of moral 
progress, or social revolution, follows close upon another : 
" Watchman, what of the night ?" And gazing into the 
deep darkness of the future, you would fain read what are 
the coming fortunes of our people and their literature. Allow 
me then to dwell upon some of the evils that endanger our 
rising literature, and threaten to suffuse the bloom of its 
3 



10 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

youth with their fatal virus. I would next bring before you 
the remedy /which as scholars, patriots, and Christians, we 
are bound to apply to these evils, and to which we must look 
as our preservative against the approaching danger. 

Evils to be found' besetting and perilling American litera- 
ture, and the remedy of those evils, will afford our present 
theme. I may seem to dwell for a time, at least, upon the 
darker shades of a picture, that may, I fear, appear to some 
of my respected hearers, overcharged in its gloom. I must 
also from the nature of the subject enter into some details, 
that will, I must expect, severely tax the patience of all who 
are listening. I can only cast myself upon your indulgence ; 
find an apology as to the length of some statements, and the 
denser shade cast by others, in the wide and varied nature 
of the subject, and its mingled difficulty, delicacy, and im- 
portance ; asking the aid of Him whose blessing can never 
fail those that trust in Him, the author of all knowledge, and 
the final arbiter who will bring into judgment all our employ- 
ments, whether literary or practical, social or solitary. 

We would then dwell for a time, on some of the dangers 
that threaten the rising literature of our land. If the fore- 
ground of the landscape be dark, we trust to show in the 
distance the sure and sufficient remedy of these dangers ; 
and though night be spread on the summits of the nearer 
and lower mountains, we see glittering on the crest of the 
remoter and loftier heights beyond, the Star of Hope, that 
portends the coming day, and under the edge of the darkest 
cloud we seem to discern already the gleams of the approach- 
ing sun. Our country may suffer and struggle, but we trust 
it is not the purpose of Him who has so signally blest and 
so long defended us, that she should suffer long, or sink far, 
much less sink finally and for ever. 

First then among the evil tendencies that beset our youth- 
ful literature, and are likely to thwart and mar its progress, 
we would name, the mechanical and utilitarian spirit of the 
times. We are as a nation eminently practical in our char- 
acter. It is well that we should be so. But this trait in oui 
national feelings and manners has its excesses and its con 
sequent perils. Placed in a country where labor and integ- 
rity soon acquire wealth, the love of wealth has become a 
passion with multitudes. The lust of gain seems at times a 
national sin easily besetting all classes of society amongst us. 
Fierce speculations at certain intervals of years engross the 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 11 

hearts of the community, and a contagious frenzy sends men 
from all walks of life and all occupations into the field of 
traffic. Fortunes are rapidly made and as rapidly lost. The 
nation seems to be lifted up as on a rushing tide of hope and 
prosperity. It subsides as rapidly as it had risen ; and on 
every side are seen strewn the wrecks of fortune, credit, 
character, and principle. All this affects our literature. 
We are in the influential classes, a matter-of-fact and money- 
getting race. This tends, in the minds of many, to create a 
distaste for all truth that is not at once convertible into 
wealth, and its value to be calculated in current coin. In 
the clank and din of our never-tiring machinery, the voice 
of wisdom is often drowned, and the most momentous and 
stirring truths are little esteemed because they cannot be 
rated in the Price Current or sold on the Exchange. We 
are impatient to see the material results of every truth, and 
to have its profits told upon our fingers, or pressed into our 
palms. So, on the other hand, if any principle, plan, or ex- 
pedient, be it true or be it false, will effect our purpose, pro- ' 
duce a needful impression, and secure an end that we deem 
desirable, we are prone to think it allowable because it is 
effective. We idolize effect. And a philosophy of expedi- 
ency thus springs up, which sacrifices everything to imme- 
diate effects and to mere material results — a philosophy 
which, in practice, if not in theory, is driving rapidly against 
some of the very bulwarks of moral principle that our fathers 
believed, and believed justly, to be grounded in the law, and 
built into the very throne of God. 

Now we need not say that where this utilitarian and 
mechanical spirit acquires the ascendancy in our literature, 
it must operate dangerously on the state and the church. 
The prosperity which is built on gain, and the morality that 
is built on expediency, will save no nation. Wo to that na- 
tion in which Political Economy swallows up all its The- 
ology ; and the law of self is the basis of all its wisdom r 
The declining glories of Tyre and Holland, each in her day 
mistress of the sea, and guardian of its treasures, may read 
us an admonitory lesson as to the fatal blight that such a 
spirit breathes over the freedom, the arts and the learning 
of a land. 

We are, by the favoring Providence of God, placed under 
political institutions which more readily yield to and reflect 
the popular will, than the government and laws of other. 



12 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

lands. The literature of our nation, more directly than that 
of earlier times, or of older countries, moulds the political 
action of the nation. Let but the spirit of expediency and 
of gain sway our political literature in the thousand journals 
of our country, and in the myriads of voters whom these 
journals educate and govern ; let the same spirit possess the 
great parties ever to be found in a free nation, and the aspir- 
ing leaders who are the champions and oracles of those par- 
ties, and what would soon be the result? A peddling policy, 
that, disregarding the national interest and honor, would 
truckle to power and favor, carry its principles to market, 
and convert statesmanship into a trade. The country would 
be visited by an impudent, voluble, and mercenary patriot- 
ism, that shrinking from no artifice, and blushing at no 
meanness, would systematize the various arts of popularity 
into a new science of selfishness. The legislation of the 
land and its intercourse with foreign nations would be en- 
grossed by trading politicians ; huckstering their talents and 
influence to the party or the measure or the man, that should 
bid in the shape of emolument or office, the highest price for 
the commodities which they vend. The expert statesman 
would then be he who consulted most assiduously the 
weather-vane of popular favor, that he might ascertain to 
what point his conscience should be set. And should such 
time ever come over our beloved land, could our liberties 
endure when guarded only by hands so faithless, or our laws 
be either wise or just, when such men made and such men 
administered them ? 

Let the same love of selfish gain pervade the pulpits of 
our land : let the messengers of the gospel learn to prophesy 
smooth things, and instead of the " word in season," let 
them substitute the word in fashion — let them retail doctrines 
that admit no personal application, truths that wound not the 
conscience and pierce not the heart, and morals enforced by 
no motives of love to God, but by mere considerations of 
gain or honor — let them compile unoffending truisms and 
dexterous sophisms, and put these in place of unpalatable 
truths — let them listen to the echoes of popular opinion ever- 
more, that they may in them learn their lessons of duty ; 
and where soon is the gospel so administered, and where is 
the church, if left but to such instruction ? The far-sighted 
law of righi, as God ordained and administers it, would be 
overthrown, that in its stead might be set up the law of interest, 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 13 

as short-sighted man expounds it ; and a creed by which 
the world is to be humored, flattered and adored, would be 
audaciously preached at the foot of a cross which ransomed 
that world only by renouncing and only by defying it. No 
— gain is not godliness. 

But man was made for other purposes than to coin or ex- 
change dollars. The fable of Midas pestered with his riches, 
and unable to eat because his food turned to gold, is full of 
beneficial instruction in such times as ours. Man has wants 
which money cannot supply, and sorrows which lucre can- 
not heal ; although cupidity may teach him often to make 
expediency or immediate utility the standard of his code of 
morals. Conscience, too, will utter at times her protest, 
slip aside the gag, and declaim loudly against practices she 
cannot approve, however they may for the time profit. A 
literature merely venal will not then meet all the necessities 
of man's nature. And not from conscience only is the reign 
of covetousness threatened and made insecure. Mere feel- 
ing and passion lead men often to look to other than their 
pecuniary interests, and in quest of yet dearer objects they 
trample on gain, and sacrifice the mere conveniences to 
secure the higher enjoyments of life. But here, in this last 
named fact, is found the source of yet another danger to our 
literature. Passion is not a safer moral guide to a people 
than interest. 

2. Let us dwell on this new inimical influence by which 
our literature may suffer. Our age is eminently, in some 
of its leading minds, an age of passion. It is seen in the 
character of much of the most popular literature, and espe- 
cially the poetry of our day. Much of this has been the 
poetry of intense passion, it mattered little how unprincipled 
that passion might be. An English scholar lately gone from 
this world (it is to Southey that we refer), branded this 
school of modern literature, in the person of its great and 
titled leader, as the Satanic school. 3 It has talent and genius, 

3 Another English scholar, whose writings may be quoted as affording 
evidence of a re-action that has followed the influence of Byron, holds this 
language. Speaking of the heroes of Byron, he remarks: "They exhibit 
rather passions personified than persons impassioned. But there is a yet worse 
defect ; Lord Byron's conception of a hero is an evidence, not only of scanty 
materials of knowledge from which to construct the ideal of a human bang, 
but also of a want of perception of what is great or noble in our nature. His 
heroes are creatures abandoned to their passions, and essentially, therefore, 
weak of mind. They must be perceived to be beings in whom there is no 



14 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

high powers of imagination and language, and boiling energy ; 
but it is, much of it, the energy of a fallen and revolted 
angel, with no regard for the right, no vision into eternity, 
and no hold on Heaven. We would not declaim against 
passion when employed in the service of literature. Inform- 
ed by strong feelings, truth becomes more awful and more 
lovely ; and some of the ages which unfettered the passions 
of a nation, have given birth to master-pieces of genius. 
But Passion divorced from Virtue is ultimately among the 
fellest enemies to literary excellence. When yoked to the 
car of duty, and reined in by principle, passion is in its ap- 
propriate place, and may accomplish a mighty service. But 
when, in domestic life, or political, or in the walks of litera- 
ture, passion throws off these restraints and exults in its own 
uncontrolled power, it is as useless for purposes of good, and 
as formidable from its powers of evil, as a car whose liery 
coursers have shaken off bit and rein, and trampled under 
foot their charioteer. The Maker of man made conscience 
to rule his other faculties, and when it is dethroned, the 
result is ruin. Far as the literature to which we have alluded 



strength, except that of their intensely selfish passions — in whom all is vani- 
ty ; their exertions being for vanity under the name of love or revenge, and 
their sufferings for vanity under the name of pride. If such beings as these 
are to be regarded as heroical, where in human nature are we to look for 
what is low in sentiment or infirm in character?" It is not the language 
of theologians we are now quoting, but the words we have transcribed are 
those of u a prophet of their own" — of a living dramatic poet — Henry Tay- 
lor, the author of " Philip Van Artevelde." Elsewhere he uses the aid of 
verse to pronounce a similar judgment. 

"Then learned I to despise that far-famed school 

Who place in wickedness their pride, and deem 
Power chiefly to be shown where passions rule, 

And not where they are ruled ; in whose new scheme 

Of heroism, self-government should seem 
A thing left out, or something to contemn — 

Whose notions, incoherent as a dream, 
Make strength go with the torrent, and not stem, 
For 'wicked and thence weak,' is not a creed for them. 

11 1 left these passionate weaklings : I perceived 

What took away all nobleness from pride, 
All dignity from sorrow ; what bereaved 

Even genius of respect : they seemed allied 

To mendicants, that by tin; highway side 
Expose their self-inflicted wounds, to gain 

The alms of sympathy — far best denied. 
I heard the Borrowful sensualist complain. 
if wilh compassion, not without disdain." 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 15 

spreads, it cherishes an insane admiration for mere talent or 
mental power. It substitutes as a guide in morals, sentiment 
for conscience ; and makes blind feeling the irresistible fate, 
whose will none may dispute, and whose doings are beyond 
the jurisdiction of casuists or lawgivers. It has much of 
occasional tenderness, and can melt at times into floods of 
sympathy : but this softness is found strangely blended with 
a savage violence. Such things often co-exist. As in the 
case cf the French hangman, who in the time of their great 
revolution was found, fresh from his gory work of the guil- 
lotine, sobbing over the sorrows of Werther, it contrives to 
ally the sanguinary to the sentimental. It seems, at first 
sight, much such an ill-assorted match as if the family of 
Mr. Wet-eyes in one of Bunyan's matchless allegories, were 
wedded to that of Giant Bloody-man in the other. But it is 
easily explained. It has been found so in all times when 
passion has been made to take the place of reason as the 
guide of a people, and conscience has been thrust from the 
throne to be succeeded by sentiment. The luxurious and 
the cruel, the fierce and the voluptuous, the licentious and 
the relentless readily coalesce ; and we soon are made to per- 
ceive the fitness of the classic fable by which, in the old 
Greek mythology, Venus was seen knitting her hands with 
Mars, the goddess of sensuality allying herself with the god 
of slaughter. We say much of the literature of the 
present and the last generation is thus the caterer of passion 
— lawless, fierce, and vindictive passion. And if a retired 
Student may " through the loopholes of retreat" read aright 
the world of fashion, passion seems at times acquiring an un- 
wonted ascendancy in the popular amusements of the age. 
The lewd pantomime and dance, from which the less refined 
fashion of other times would have turned her blushing and 
indignant face, the gorgeous spectacle and the shows of wild 
beasts, and even the sanguinary pugilistic combat, that some- 
times recals the gladiatorial shows of old Rome, have become, 
in our day, the favorite recreations of some classes among 
the lovers of pleasure. These are, it should be remembered, 
nearly the same with the favorite entertainments of the later 
Greek empire, w T hen, plethoric by its wealth, and enervated 
by its luxury, that power was about to be trodden down by 
the barbarian invasions of the north. 

It is possible that the same dangerous ascendency of pas- 
sion may be fostered, where we should have been slow to 



16 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

suspect it, by the ultraism of some good men among the 
social reformers of our time. Wilberforce was, in the judg- 
ment of Mackintosh, the very model of a reformer, because 
he united an earnestness that never flagged with a sweetness 
that never failed. There are good men that have nothing of 
this last trait. Amid the best intentions there is occasionally, 
in the benevolent projects even of this day, a species of Jack 
Cadeism, if we may be allowed the expression, enlisted in 
the service of reform. It seems the very opposite of the 
character of Wilberforce, nourishes an acridity anu violence 
of temper that appears to delight in repelling, and seeks to 
enkindle feeling by wild exaggeration and personal denunci- 
ation ; raves in behalf of good with the very spirit of evil, 
and where it cannot convince assent, would extort submis- 
sion. Even truth itself, when administered at a scalding 
heat, cannot benefit the recipient ; and the process is not safe 
for the hands of the administrator himself. 

Far be it from us to decry earnestness when shown in the 
cause of truth and justice, or to forget how the passion 
awakened in some revolutionary crisis of a people's history, 
has often infused into the productions of genius an unwonted 
energy, and clothed them as with an immortal vigor. But 
it is passion yoked to the chariot of reason, and curbed by 
the strong hand of principle ; laboring in the traces, but not 
grasping the reins. But set aside argument and truth, and 
give to passion its unchecked course, and the effect is fatal. 
It may at first seem to clothe a literature with new energy, 
but it is the mere energy of intoxication, soon spent, and for 
which there speedily comes a sure and bitter reckoning. 
The bonds of principle are loosened, the tastes and habits 
of society corrupted ; and the effects are soon seen extending 
themselves to the very form and style of a literature as well 
as to the morality of its productions. The intense is substi- 
tuted for the natural and true. What is effective is sought 
for rather than what is exact. Our literature therefore has 
little, in such portions of it, of the high finish and serene 
repose of the master-pieces of classic antiquity, where passion 
in its highest flights is seen wearing gracefully all the re- 
straining rules of art ; and power toils ever as under the ses- 
vere eye of order. 

3. A kindred evil, the natural result and accompaniment 
of that to which we have last adverted, and like it fatal to 
the best interests of literature, is the lawlessness, unhappily 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 17 

but too rife through large districts of our territory, and in 
various classes of its inhabitants. Authority in the parent, 
the magistrate or the pastor, seems daily to be held by a less 
firm tenure. Obedience seems to be regarded rather as a 
boon, and control resented as usurpation. The restraints of 
honesty in the political and commercial intercourse of society 
seem more feebly felt. In those intrusted by the state and 
by public corporations with the control of funds, the charges 
of embezzlement and defalcation have within the last few 
years multiplied rapidly in number and swelled fearfully in 
amount ; until, catching the contagion of the times, sovereign 
states are found questioning the obligations of their own 
contracts, and repudiating their plighted word and bond. In 
the matter of good faith between man and man, as to pecu- 
niary engagements, the wheels of the social machine groan 
ominously, as if they were, by some internal dislocation and 
collision, ready to tear asunder the fabric of society. Pri- 
vate revenge and the sudden ebullitions of popular violence, 
disregarding all delays and setting aside all forms, seem in 
some districts ready to supplant the quiet administration of 
the laws, and dispensing alike with judges and prisons. The 
laws of God, too, are often as lightly regarded as the laws 
of human society. In the growing facility of divorce, the 
statute of Heaven intended to guard the purity of home, and 
lying at the foundation of all society, is to some extent in- 
fringed upon : while our railroads and canals have run their 
lines fearlessly athwart the Sabbath ; and it seems a question 
whether the flaming Sinai should be allowed to stand any 
longer in the pathway of modern improvement. 

And amid such scenes of disorder and commotion, it is — 
scenes illustrating so fearfully the depravity, inveterate and 
entire, of the human heart — it is, we say, amid such scenes 
that men are rising up to remodel all society. In some of 
these proposed reforms there is a reckless disorganization, 
and in most of them, we fear, scarce a due appreciation, of 
God's primitive but incomparable institution for the social 
happiness of the race, the family or household. In its sepa- 
rate interests, its seclusion and distinctness, are involved, we 
cannot but think, much of the virtue, the tranquillity and 
the felicity of mankind. 

At the attempt we ought not perhaps to be so much sur- 
prised, as at the principles on which it proceeds. On these 
we look with irrepressible astonishment. They assume the 

4 



18 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

natural innocence of man, and trace all his miseries and all 
his crimes to bad government, to false views of society, and 
to ignorance respecting the true relations of man to man — - 
relations which after the lapse of so many centuries they 
have been the first to reveal. They would not merely over- 
look, but deny that melancholy truth, the Fall of Man from 
his original state, and his consequent native depravity ; a 
truth never to be forgotten by all that would exercise a true 
benevolence to their brother man, and by all that would 
build up a stable government. In denying this truth, they 
contradict all the experience, all the history, and shall we 
not add, all the consciousness of our race. A truth which 
even blinded and haughty heathenism mournfully acknow- 
ledged — a truth which Revelation asserts so emphatically 
and so often, cannot with impunity be forgotten by any that 
would attempt the reform of man's condition. Vague and 
wild in principle, and comparatively barren of results, must 
all reforms be that would make all their improvements from 
without, and feel that none is needed within. It seems to 
us, in the moral economy of society, much such an error 
as it would be in medical science to prescribe to the symp- 
toms and not to the disease ; and to aim at relieving the 
petty details and discomforts of sickness, while unable to 
discover and incompetent to treat the primal, radical evil, 
the deep-seated malady out of which these external symp- 
toms spring. It is not man's condition alone that needs 
bettering, but his heart much more. We would honor even 
the misguided zeal of our brethren of the race who seek in 
any form to lessen the amount of human misery and wrong ; 
but the claims of our Common Father, and the wrongs He 
has met at our hands, are to be acknowledged by all who 
would pity, with an effectual compassion, human sorrow, 
and remedy with an enduring relief, social disorder and 
wretchedness. To forget or to contradict these truths, is to 
reject the lessons alike of history and scripture. All reform 
ho based is itself but a new, though it may be unconscious, 
lawlessness. 

We have said that proposals of social reform are not causes 
of wonder. Already human life is less secure in many por- 
tions of our republic than under some of the European mon- 
archies ; and frauds and embezzlements are less surely and 
less severely punished. In some of our legislatures, in the 
very halls, and under the awful eye, as it were, of the 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 19 

embodied Justice of the State, brawls and murders have oc- 
curred, in which our legislators were the combatants and the 
victims. And yet in such a state of things, when human 
life is growing daily cheaper, and the fact of assassination 
seems to awaken scarce a tithe of the sympathy, horror and 
inquiry, which it provoked in our fathers' times — it is in such 
a state of things, that by a strange paradox, a singular clem- 
ency for the life of the assassin seems to be springing up. 
In a nation lax to a fault in the vindication of human life 
when illegally taken away, the protest is made most pas- 
sionately against its being taken away legally ; and the abo- 
lition of Capital Punishment is demanded by earnest and 
able agitators. Would that the picture thus dark were but 
the sketch of Fancy ; unhappily its gloomy hues are but the 
stern coloring of Truth. Can the patriot, as he watches 
such omens, fail to see the coming judgment? Can he shut 
his eyes against the fact so broadly printed on all the pages 
of history, that anarchy makes despotism necessary ; that 
men who are left lawless soon fly for refuge even to a scep- 
tre of iron, and a law of blood ; that a Robespierre has ever 
prepared the way for a Bonaparte, and the arts of the reck- 
less demagogue, like Catiline, have smoothed the path for 
the violence of the able usurper, like Caesar? Of all this, 
should it unhappily continue or increase, the effects must 
with growing rapidity be seen in the injury done to our lite- 
rature. There is a close and strange connection between 
moral and literary integrity. Not only does social confusion 
discourage the artist and the scholar, but disjointed and anar- 
chical times are often marked by a want of laborious truth, 
and of seriousness and earnestness on the part of the popu- 
lar writers. A passion for frivolity, a temper that snatches 
at temporary triumphs by flattering the whim of the hour, 
and a science of agreeable, heartless trifling, spring up in 
such days to the bane alike of all eloquence, and of all truth. 
4. Another of the perils which seem to us lying in the 
way of our rising literature, is a false liberalism. To a 
manly and Christian toleration we can never be opposed. 
Something of this toleration is required by our free inter- 
course with many lands. The wonders of steam are melting 
the nations most highly civilized into comparative uniformity 
and unity. Our colonists are the emigrants of many shores. 
In this audience are found blended the blood of the Celt and 
the Saxon, the Norman and the Roman. We are scions 



20 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

alike from the stock of those who fought beneath, and those 
who warred successively against the eagles of the old Latin 
empire. Our varied origin seems giving to America, as its 
varied learning has given to Germany, a " many-sided mind ;" 
a sympathy at many points with mankind, and with widely 
diversified forms of society. More easily than the English, 
the ancestors whom many of us claim, we adopt the pecu- 
liarities of other nations. And all this is well. But when 
we suffer these influences to foster in us the notion that all 
the moral peculiarities, and all the forms of faith, marking 
the various tribes from which our country is supplied, and 
with which our commerce connects us, are alike valuable ; 
when, instead of an enlightened love of truth wherever found, 
we learn indifference to all truth, and call this new feeling 
by the name of superiority to prejudice ; when we learn to 
think of morals as if they were little more than a conven- 
tional matter, the effect of habit or tradition, or the results 
of climate or of the physical constitution of a people, we 
are learning lessons alike irrational, and perilous, and untrue. 4 
The spirit of Pope's Universal Prayer seems to many, in 
consequence of these and other influences, the essence of 
an enlightened Christian charity. They cannot endure the 
anathemas of Paul against those who deny his Lord. They 
would classify the Koran and the Shaster with the Scrip- 
tures. Some have recently discovered a truth of which 
those writers were themselves strangely ignorant, that the 
Deistical and Atheistical scholars of France, the Theorna- 



4 It is well that we should cherish an humble sense of our own fallibility ; 
but whatever may be true of us, God and Scripture are infallible. The Crea- 
tor, too, so constituted his universe, that there is truth in it, and throughout 
it; and he has so constituted man as to thirst with an inextinguishable 
longinsr after truth. An utter despair of obtaining it, and a general acknow- 
ledgment that we are altogether and inevitably in the wrong, is alike a state 
of misery to man, and a dishonor done to God. It may give birth to a sort 
of toleration, but it is the spurious toleration of Pyrrhonism, a liberality that 
patronizes error, but that can be fierce against the truth for as the wise and 
meek Carey complained, skeptics may be the most intolerant of mankind 
against the truth. They resent naturally that strong conviction and that 
ardenl zeal, which they hive not for themselves, but which the consciousness 
of truth possessed, and the benevolent desire of its general diffusion, natu- 
rally inspire in the hi liever. They envy the votaries of the truth, their calm, 
immovable assurance. A Christian toleration appreciates the innate power 
of truth to diffuse and protect itself, and pities error, while resisting it. The 
liberality of skepticism denies existence to truth, and canonizes error as a 
sufficient substitute, and sets men afloal on a shoreless, starless ocean of 
doubt. Or as a young poet of England has not infelicitously described it, it 
prescribes to mankind the task of conjugating falsehood through all its mooda, 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 21 

chists who prepared the way for its revolution, the men who 
loaded the Crucified Nazarene and his religion with all out- 
rage, were in truth Christians, although they knew it not 
themselves. Just as much, it seems to us, as Nero was an 
unconscious Howard; just as much as Catiline was, in mo- 
dest ignorance of his own merits, " a Washington, who had 
anticipated his time." 

It is worse than idle thus to confound all moral distinctions. 
To suit these new and more liberal views of Christianity, it 
has become of course necessary to revise the gospel, and to 
supersede at least the ancient forms of the Christian religion. 
Thus in a land, the literature and religion of which are 
becoming more and more known to some of our scholars, 
Strauss has eviscerated the New Testament of all its facts, 
and leaves in all its touching and miraculous narrations but 
the fragments of a popular myth — intended to shadow forth 
certain truths common in the history of human nature in all 
ages. The nation to which he belongs, and which claims to 
be the most profound in metaphysical speculation and in 
varied learning, of all the nations of our time, is reviving in 
some of its schools an undisguised Pantheism, which makes 
the universe God ; and thus, in effect, gives to Job and the 
dunghill on which he sate, the ulcers which covered him, and 
the potsherds with which he scraped himself, the honor of 
being all, parts and parcels alike of the same all-pervading 
Deity. And this is the wisdom, vaunted and profound, of 
our times ; a return, in fact, to those discoveries described 
of old in a venerable volume which we all wot of, in the 
brief and pithy sentence — " The world by wisdom knew not 
God." The result of its arrogant self-confidence was blind- 
tenses, and cases, and teaches them mutual forbearance as the result of their 
common infatuation. 

( " Let them alone," men cry, 
" I lie, thou liest, they lie : 
What then? Thy neighbor's folly hurts not thee!" 
Error is Freedom ! such the insensate shout 
Of crowds, that like a Paean, hymn a doubt: 
Indifference thus the world calls Charity. 
********* 
1 " Battles at last shall cease." 

At last, not now : we are not yet at home. 
The time is coming, it will soon be come. 
When those who dare not fight 
For God, or for the right, 
Shall fight for peace !' 

From " The Waldenses, and other Poems ;" 

by Aubrey de Vere. Oxford, 1842. P. 127. 



22 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

ness to the great fact blazing on the whole face of creation, 
and deafness to the dread voice that speaks out of all history, 
the truth that there is a God. And hence, not so much from 
any singular cogency in his reasoning, as from the palata- 
bleness of the results which that reasoning reaches, Baruch 
Spinoza, the Pantheist Jew, is, after a long lapse of years 
of confutation and obscurity, rising again in the view of some 
scholars in Germany, Britain, and America, to the rank of 
a guide in morals and a master of religious truth. 5 When 

5 Of the system of Spinoza it has been said by the acute Bayle, certainly 
no bigoted adherent to Christianity, and no prejudiced enemy of skepticism, 
that "it was the most monstrous scheme imaginable;" and again, that "it 
has been fully overthrown, even by the weakest of its adversaries." In a 
similar spirit, Maclaurin, the^celebrated British mathematician, had remarked, 
" It does not, indeed, appear possible to invent another system equally ab- 
surd." (Dugald Stewart's Progress of Metaphysical Philosophy, p. 116. Am. 
Edition.) Stewart quotes from Colerus, the author of the earliest Life of Spi- 
noza, the singular anecdote, that " one of the amusements with which he was 
accustomed to unbend his mind, was that of entangling flies in a spider's 
web, or of setting spiders to fighting with each other; on which occasions 
(it is added), he would observe their combats with so much interest that it 
was not unusual for him to be seized with immoderate fits of laughter." 
{Ibidem, p. 351.) Stewart, we think, lays too much stress on this incident, 
when he finds in it a proof of Spinoza's insanity. It was, certainly, not the 
most amiable trait in the character of a philosopher for whom his disciples 
have claimed a remarkable blamelessness and even piety. We cannot ima- 
gine such an amusement as delighting the vacant hours, and such merriment 
as gladdening the heart of a Christian philosopher like Bayle or Newton. 
Trivial as it was, it betrayed the spirit, and furnished no unapt emblem, of 
the system he elaborated in his philosophy, where an acute mind found its 
amusement in entangling to their ruin its hapless victims in a web of sophis- 
try, that puzzled, caught and destroyed them; and grim Blasphemy lay 
waiting to devour those who fluttered in the snares of Falsehood. 

Yet this system, the product of such a mind, has been recently, with loud 
panegyrics of its author, commended anew to the regard of mankind on 
either side of the Atlantic. Paulus, the celebrated Neologian divine of Ger- 
many, had issued, years ago, an edition of his works. Amongst ourselves 
and the scholars of England, such views have obtained currency mostly, it 
is probable, from the admiration professed for Spinoza by such men as Goethe, 
and others, the scholars and philosophers of Germany, for whom we have 
contracted too indiscriminating a reverence. Goethe's course was paradox- 
ical. Rejecting revelation as impossible, for the singular reason that if it 
came from God it must be unintelligible to men, and declaring God as pre- 
sented in the teachings of Christ Jesus, to be an imperfect and inadequate 
conception, Goethe held that the Divinity revealed in the Bible involved 
difficulties which must drive an inquirer to despair, unless he were "great 
enough to rise to the stand-point of a higher view ;" in other words, a higher 
point of observation than that occupied by Christ. "Such a stand-point 
ductlic early found in Spinoza; and he acknowledges with joy how truly 
the views of that great thinker answered to the wants of his youth. In him 
lie found, himself, and could therefore fortify himself with Spinoza to the best 
advantage." These are the words of Eckerman (EcLerman's Convers. icitk 
Goethe. Boston, p. 37), who played with Goethe the part that James Bosweli 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 23 

such a form of philosophy becomes prevalent, all forms of 
religion are alike true, or in other words, are alike false ; 
and room is to be made for a new religion by which man 
shall worship Nature or himself. So difficult is it for the 
gospel to suit men's waywardness. It was the objection of 
the old Pagans to Christianity, as we learn from Origen, 
that it was too universal a religion ; that every country 
should of right be allowed a religion of its own ; and Chris- 
tianity was arrogant in asking to be received as the one faith 

acted to the great lexicographer and moralist, of England, recording as an 
humble admirer, the conversations of his oracle. Of the moral character of 
some of the productions of Goethe we need not pause to remark. There are 
principles developed in his writings that needed "fortifying." We would 
but notice a difficulty which the language of his admirer suggests. Goethe 
is made to speak of Spinoza as the thinker "in whom he found himself 1 
To us, the uninitiated, it seems hard to reconcile this test by which he 
recognized and adopted his master's system, with his passionate words else- 
where, recorded by the same admiring Eckerman, (p. 309.) " Man is a dark- 
ened being ; he knows not whence he comes, nor whither he goes ; he knows 
little of the world, and less of himself. / know not myself and may God 
protect me from it." How the rule of the old Greek wisdom, " know thy- 
self," might seem folly to the modern German we can conceive : and how 
the view of his own heart might shock and appal one who would fain idolize 
his own wisdom and virtue, we can, with as little difficulty, imagine. But 
how one who shrunk from knowing himself, could, by knowing himself, 
recognize the truth of a system of Pantheism, is to us inconceivable. A 
religion that begins in dogmatic ignorance as to our own nature, and ends 
in dogmatic omniscience as to God's nature, does not commend itself to our 
reason, more than it does to our sympathies, or our hopes. 

An affecting proof may be gathered from the same volume (pp. 405, 407), 
how easily the Pantheism of the schools slides into the Polytheism of the 
multitude. Goethe had received a cast of a piece of statuary. A model 
from Myron's cow with the sucking calf, was sent him by a young artist. 
"Here," said he, "we have a subject of the highest sort — the nourishing 
principle which upholds the world, and pervades all nature, is brought before 
our eyes by this beautiful symbol. This, and others of a like nature, I esteem 
the true symbols of the omnipresence of God." What the omnipresence of the 
Deity, in the system of Pantheism is, we need not linger to remark. Skep- 
tics have affected to wonder at the unaccountable perverseness of the chil- 
dren of Israel forging and adoring their golden calf at the foot of Sinai ; but 
here we have the practice palliated by a master-spirit of skepticism, amid 
the boasted illumination of the nineteenth century. A cow with her calf is, 
according to Goethe, " the true symbol ," of the all-pervading, all-sustaining 
Divinity, who comprises, and himself is, the universe. Did Pantheism but 
rule the schools, we can see how easily idolatry in its most brutish forms 
might be revived among the populace ; and the ox-gods and onion-gods of 
Egypt at which even a heathen Juvenal jeered, might, amid all our vaunted 
advance in knowledge, receive again the worship of our scholars. Pantheism 
is the philosophy of Brahminism with all its hundred thousand graven images, 
from Ganeshu with his elephant's head to Doorga with her necklace of hu- 
man skulls. The men who had outgrown the Bible, and found themselves 
wiser than the Redeemer, might, under the auspices of Pantheism, return to 
the worship of Apis, and adore the gods of the dairy and the stall, as they 



84 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

of all countries. But now the opposers of this gospel dis- 
cover that it has the defect of not being universal enough ; 
and they wish a wider faith, that will embrace the race, let 
them think as they please, and worship as they may. Thus 
would this school reconcile all religions by evaporating them. 
In Germany, the country that has most cultivated this hid- 
eous error, it has as yet, we believe, prevailed chiefly among 
portions of the literary classes, and not reached the peasant- 
ry ; and the nation thus affected are less prone to reduce 
their opinions to action, and are both more speculative and 
less practical than ourselves. But let such a doctrine come 
amongst us and grow to be popular. Let it pass from the 
libraries of a few dreaming scholars into our common schools, 
our workshops, our farm-houses, and our homes. Like an 
active poison released from its confinement in the dim labo- 
ratory of the chemist, where it was comparatively unknown 
and innocuous, let it be sprinkled into every pipkin simmer- 
ing upon the cottage hearth on either side of the Allegha- 
nies ; let our newspapers drop the doctrine, as a manna of 
death, from their multitudinous wings, around every hamlet 
and habitation of the land, and what were the result 1 Where, 
in one short week, were our freedom, our peace, or our 
morals? all a buried wreck, submerged beneath a weltering 
ocean of misery and sin. The soul with no immortal herit- 
age — crime released from its fears of the avenger — and sor- 
row stripped of its hope of a comforter; the world without 
a Governor, and the race left fatherless, with the fact of the 

stood chewing their cud, or suckling their calves. Then the science and 
taste of the nineteenth century would be required to take, as the emblem of 
their aspirations, the craven Hebrews of Ezekiel's vision ; " men with their 
backs towards the temple of the Lord, and their faces towards the East." — 
(Eze. viii. 16.) The Christian missions of our time, assailing eastern heathen- 
ism, would be repaid by an irruption of Oriental Pantheism into our schools 
of philosophy; the Sufis of Persia and the Brahmins of India would re- 
taliate on the native lands of their Christian antagonists, and our Careys and 
our Martyns would be chargeable with having assailed, in the Pantheistic 
faith they found in the East, a higher truth than they had themselves 
brought from the West. A living German historian, whose works have 
found translation and currency in England (Schlosser), in his History of the 
Eighteenth Century, has intimated broadly, that the most ancient tradition 
makes Pantheism the original faith of the world. 

Thus does the philosophy that would fain soar over the head of our Saviour, 
to a higher and more adequate view of the Divine Nature, find itself grovel- 
ling at last in the very mire of beast-worship. It is, with no impaired rev- 
erence for his Bible, that the Christian student turns from such spectacles of 
human presumption and impiety, to muse on the sovereignty and adore the 
wisdom of Him, who thus " taketh the wise in their own craftiness." 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 25 

redemption and the hope of the resurrection alike blotted 
out ; surely these are doctrines no false claims of liberality 
can palliate. And yet to such tremendous results is tending 
much of the miscalled liberality of our times. 

This false liberalism is aiding the lawlessness of which we 
have before spoken, in rejecting all regard to precedent, and 
all reverence for antiquity. 

5. But in the natural antagonism of the human mind to 
such excesses as these, is seen rising a fifth principle, that 
of Superstition ; and though opposed to the last error, yet 
in its own way preparing injury, from still another side, to 
the literary interests of our nation. It may seem to some 
idle to talk of superstition as a peril of the nineteenth century. 
But an age that devours so eagerly the prodigies of Animal 
Magnetism, is not quite entitled to talk superciliously of the 
superstition of their forefathers in having been believers in 
witchcraft. Much of the history of the human mind is but a 
history of oscillations between opposite extremes of error. 
There is naturally, in the soul of man, a recoil from the 
narrowness of the mechanical and utilitarian spirit, as well 
as from the lawlessness and the false liberalism of which we 
have already spoken as evils of the times ; while the deifica- 
tion of passion, another of those evils, makes welcome a 
religion of absolutions and indulgences. And in this recoil, 
that antiquity which these former influences would reject, 
this new principle would not only retain but idolize. It is 
difficult to cast off all regard for those who have preceded us. 
It is not easy to persuade ourselves that we are men and 
that our ancestors were but brutes. And there are, conse- 
quently, several indications in the science, literature, and art 
of the times, of a current setting steadily and rapidly towards 
reverence for the past, a regard for the imaginative and the 
venerable, in place of the cold idolatry of the useful ; a drift- 
ing back of the popular mind towards the times when the 
Roman church was a dominant power in European civiliza- 
tion. The Dark Ages once spoken of in our school-boy 
days, are now more respectfully entitled the Middle Ages. 
Their schoolmen, once derided, are now studied by some 
scholars, and quoted by more. Cousin, the leading meta- 
physician of France, has edited an unpublished work of Abe- 
lard, as some of the Protestant theologians of England have 
been republishing treatises of Aquinas. In church music the 
ancient chant is revived. In church architecture, the Gothic, 

5 



26 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

but a few years since thought uncouth and cumbrous, and 
almost but another name for barbarous, the architecture of 
the old time-worn cathedral, and the ruinous abbey, is now 
regarded as the very perfection of beauty — " the frozen mu- 
sic" 6 of the art. In English poetry, the classical school of 
Pope has given place to the romantic school of Scott and 
Byron, in which the customs and the religious opinions of 
the old ages of chivalry are more or less brought again to 
recollection ; whilst most of the scholars of Britain seem in- 
clined to transfer the honors of the Augustan age of their 
literature from the reign of Queen Anne to the elder days 
of Queen Elizabeth. A powerful party in its Established 
Church are attempting to revive the doctrines of Laud, San- 
croft, and the school of the Nonjurors ; and to develop the 
Catholic element in their church polity to an extent which 
to others it would seem must render union with, and 
subjection to Rome, the final and inevitable result of the 
general ascendency of the party. Indeed the practical cha- 
racter of the English mind, and their disposition to reduce 
to action all opinions, would seem to forbid that the prose- 
lytes of the new school should retain a foothold on the steep 
declivity where their teachers contrive to stand, by the aid 
of subtle distinctions. The nation once indoctrinated must 
rush down to Rome. By a sort of moral gravitation inherent 
in the Catholic system, the lesser must be attracted to the 
larger body, and the more recent be absorbed in the more 
ancient. All attempts to stay them, on such a system, would 
be like arresting an avalanche, mid-way on its descent, and 
securing it to the sides of the Alps by strips of court-plaster. 
In the literature of France, the contest a few years since 
so eagerly waged among that mercurial people between the 
classical and the romantic schools, would seem now to have 
been decided to the advantage of the latter, thus attaching 
the European mind, as by a new bond, to the Mediaeval 
times. In some of the French historians, and the French 
are now among the best of the modern writers of history, a 
return has even been made to the picturesque style of the 
old Mediaeval chroniclers. Much of this may be, and proba- 
bly is, the fleeting fancy of the season. And all these things 
may seem to some minds but fantasies of the day, and fash- 
ions that are soon to pass ; but it should be remembered 

6 Mad. de Slacl. 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 27 

that such fantasies have in passing shaken thrones, and sub- 
verted dynasties ; and that such fashions of feeling, if we 
call them so, have maddened whole nations, and in the days 
of the French Revolution armed France, almost as one man, 
against the rest of Europe, as in the days of the Crusades 
they had hurled Europe, in one embattled mass, upon Asia. 
Favored by these, among other influences, the Church, 
which is the great representative of superstition in Christen- 
dom — it is the Romish church we mean — is rising rapidly to 
some of her lost eminence and influence. She is multiplying 
amongst us her colleges, many of them under the charge of 
that order, the Jesuits, who were once the most renowned 
instructors of Europe. Upon the field of Foreign Missions 
she is jostling eagerly each successful Protestant Mission in 
Asia, in Oceanica, or on our own continent. De Smet, a 
Jesuit missionary, boasts of the hundreds of Indians bap- 
tized near the mouth of the Columbia River, far beyond the 
Rocky Mountains ; and rumors are already spread that the 
Papal See is to be requested to constitute Oregon into a 
Romish bishopric. 7 But what is far more wondrous is the 
rejuvenescence of this Church in the old strong-holds of 
Protestantism in Europe. Germany, a few years since, saw 
scholars like the Stolbergs and the Schlegels passing over 
from Protestantism into the Papal communion. Scotland, 
over whose grey mountains seems yet brooding the stern 
and solemn earnestness of her old reformers — the land where 
Knox destroyed the monasteries, "dinging down" the rook- 
eries that the rooks might not return, has seen of late her 
Romish chapels not only, but her Romish nunneries, erected, 
and not left untenanted by votaries. Geneva, once the 
Athens of the Reformation, is itself threatened with the ca- 
lamity of becoming a Romish State. 8 In England, the bul- 

7 Since created. 

8 Such is the testimony of a recent traveller, a clergyman of Scotland, the 
Rev. Dr. Heugh, in his " Notices of the State of Religion in Geneva and Bd- 
gium," Glasgow, 1844, pp. 205-210. "In the Genevese territory itself, the 
progress of Popery is rapid beyond all precedent. For a long period subse- 
quent to the Reformation, there could have been few, if any, resident Catho- 
lics within the territory. A great and rapid change has recently taken place. 
During the long occupation of Geneva by the French, that is from 1798 to 
1814, both infidel and Popish influence made alarming progress. In the 
latter year, a small additional territory was annexed, by treaty, to Geneva, 
and being taken from Savoy, the population was entirely Catholic. It was 
at this period that the Roman Catholic religion won the support of the State, 
equally with the Protestant. From that time, the activity of the Popish 



88 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

wark of European Protestantism, the progress of the Romish 
Church in numbers, wealth, boldness, and influence, within 
the last few years, has been most rapid. And in some por- 
tions of the earth, this artful and versatile power, rich in the 
arts of centuries of diplomacy, and so long the ally of Des- 
potism, and herself almost an incarnation of Oppression, 

clergy and their party has been unremitting ; and by the formation of schools, 
by domiciliary visitation, by public processions, by preaching, by the press, 
they are straining every nerve to reduce long rebellious Geneva to her ab- 
Ijured allegiance to the See of Rome. Far from attempting to conceal their 
efforts, their object, and their confident expectations, they glory in avowing 
them ; they already exult in their anticipated success ; and with too large a 
proportion of such a population as they have to do with, confidence is re- 
garded as the prestige of victory. It is not long since the Popish party 
modestly requested that the chief church in Geneva, Calvin's church, the 
cathedral itself, should be restored to them. Except when the eclat of a com- 
munion attracts a throng of Unitarian formalists, the cathedral, we have 
seen, is nearly empty at the usual worship of the Sabbath; and the cold of 
winter is such an overmatch for Unitarian ardor, that during that season 
they surrender their cathedral, without a sigh, to the undisturbed possession 
of the fogs and frosts, inviting the few worshippers who are not quite be- 
numbed, to assemble in a small and more comfortable place adjoining. The 
Roman Catholics sought the restoration of a place of worship for which the 
Protestants appear to have so little need, accompanying the request with the 
sarcastic intimation, that they would keep the cathedral open all the year 
round, and that their numbers would keep it warm enough even during the 
winter s cold. The clergy, it is said, avow their conviction, that the question 
of occupancy is but a question of time; that there is no doubt that Geneva 
will soon be their own again; and remark with good humor, that the Prot- 
estant motto will require no change, and will soon be fulfilled in another 
sense than that in which its authors meant it — ' After darkness, light?* The 
progress of the Popish population, completes the danger. By the annexation 
of the new territory, and also by a perpetual immigration of poor Savoyards, 
in quest of the comforts of Geneva (like Hibernianlmmigration into Britain), 
the Roman Catholics have now upwards of 27,000 out of a population rather 
under 60,000; and during the last five years, the Catholic population in- 
creased by three thousand, while that of the Protestants diminished by 
two hundred, the former by immigration into the territory, the latter by 
emigration from it. That advancing minority will become, and probably 
will soon become, an actual majority, and then, suffrage being universal, 
Geneva may, by the vote of a majority of her citizens, lose her rank among 
Protestant states, renounce by open profession the Protestantism which in 
fact her ministers and her people have already betrayed, and reannex herself 
to Rome. ********** 

They have Unitarianism established already, and Catholicism virtually estab- 
lished along with it, with the near prospect of its arriving at an ascendency, 
possibly an exclusive ascendency." These are not the hasty and ill-advised 
opinions of a foreign visitant, after the lapse of a few days of hurried observa- 
tion. He quotes from a publication of the distinguished Merle D'Aubign6, 
the author of the will-known History- of the Reformation. In a work of his, 
if La Question dc VEglise" that eminent man, himself a resident of Geneva, 
says: "The faith of our fathers made Rome tremble at the name of Geneva ; 
now, alas ! Geneva trembles at the name of Rome. * * * Are we sure 

J " Fust tcnebras, lux," the motto on the escutcheon and coin of Geneva. 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 29 

seems coquetting with Democracy, and courting the spirit 
of Social Progress. It reminds one of the prediction of the 
excellent Bengel, who, with all his errors in the interpreta- 
tion of Scripture prophecy, was a scholar eminent for learn- 
ing, acuteness and profound piety, that the last days would 
witness a league of Socinianism and Romanism — the spirit 
of tradition and the spirit of rationalism. 9 In fact this Apos- 
tate Church, branded as the Babylon of New Testament 
prophecy, seems disguising her wrinkles, and painting her 
face until it is rent 10 again — rent, we mean, with some un- 
seemly contradictions of her old principles. Like Jezebel, 
in her gay old age, with tired head and lacquered eyes, she 
is seen looking out from her palace windows, not like the 
relict of Ahab, to upbraid, but to soothe and to allure the 
Jehu of the age — the Spirit of Radicalism, and the party of 
the movement, as with glowing axle, it drives the chariot 
wheels of innovation over every obstacle. And literature 
must feel, and is already feeling, in various departments, the 
weight of this new element, the element of superstition amid 
the conflicting influences of our age. The contributions, for 
instance, of Romish authors to English literature, have both 
in amount and ability been trebled, probably, within the last 
twenty years. As to the cramping and degrading power of 
all superstition on the mind, the restraints it imposes on the 

that Popery, triumphant, and perched upon our high towers, will not one 
day, and quickly, mock with bitter derision the blindness of our citizens'? 
The air is heavy, the atmosphere is choking, the night, perhaps the tempest, 
approaches. Let us enter then into our bosoms — let us reflect in that inner 
temple, and raising our cry to heaven, let us say, O God, save the country, 
for men come to destroy it. * * * * * Rome cannot change. All 
around us she advances. She builds altar after altar upon the banks of 
our lake. The progress is such amongst us, from the facility which stran- 
gers have in acquiring the right of citizenship, that quickly (every one ac- 
knowledges it) the Romish population will exceed the Protestant population 
of Geneva. * * * * Let Rome triumph at Rome, it is natural. Let 
Rome, as she assures herself, triumph at Oxford ; the conquest will be great. 
But let Rome triumph at Geneva, then she will raise a cry that will echo to 
the extremity of the universe. Genevese ! that cry will announce to the 
world the death of your country.'' It is the quotation and translation of Dr. 
Heugh that we here have used. 

9 " In the last times Popery and the Socinian heresy (a denial of the proper 
deity of Christ) will run into one another." — Memoir of John Alb. Bengel by 
John C. F. Burk) translated from the German by Robert F. Walker^ London, 
1837, p. 301. 

" But though Socinianism and Popery at present appear virtually aloof, 
they will in process of time form a mighty confluence } that will burst all 
bounds and bring every thing to a crisis." — Ibid.s p. 322. 

i° Jerem. iv. 30. 



30 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

march of science, and its violence wrought against physical 
as well as moral truth, let the story of Galileo tell, and let 
the records of Spain and her Inquisition attest. 

We would never forget, in speaking strongly of the errors 
of the Romish Church, the piety and genius that have been 
found in members of her communion. The memory of her 
Kempis, her Fenelon, her Pascal, her Arnaulds, and her 
Nicole, must ever remain dear to the Christian. But we 
would remember that to some of the best of these her chil- 
dren, she was but a harsh and persecuting step-mother, and 
that she cast out that most able and devout body of men, the 
Jansenists of France, with ignominious cruelty — branding 
their name, suppressing their books, and sparing not their 
dead. Nor, while we cherish with the tenderest reverence 
and affection, the names of some among her saints whose 
shoe-latchets we are not worthy to unloose, can we forget 
the wrongs she has inflicted upon humanity, and her blas- 
phemies against God — can we blanch the long and dark 
catalogue of her corruptions and errors, or dare to overlook 
the sentence of prophecy, branding her with infamy, and 
dooming her disastrous splendor to a fatal eclipse, and her 
power to a final and utter overthrow. 

Here then, if we have not deceived ourselves, are perils 
besetting the future course of our literature, not only real 
but formidable. Many of the details, that were unavoidable, 
may have seemed to some of our hearers trivial, but in our 
view they are trivia], only as are the weeds which float in the 
edge of the Gulf-stream. Light and valueless in themselves, 
they yet serve to remind the weary navigator what coast he 
is nearing, and what the currents whose noiseless power is 
drifting his bark away from her appointed course. Did any 
one of these several causes operate separately, it would be 
more easy to prognosticate from the signs of the times, re- 
garding the destinies of American literature. The utilitarian 
and mechanical spirit would threaten our literary glories with 
the fate of Holland, whose early splendor of scholarship was 
so fatally beclouded by her subsequent lust of gain. The 
prevalence of passion would conform us to the imbecile, lux- 
urious, trifling and vindictive character that mars so much 
the glory of modern Italy. The reign of lawlessness would 
revive in our history the later ages of Republican Greece, its 
anarchy, violence and misery. The sway of a false lib- 
eralism would renew on American shores the crimes and 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 31 

sufferings of the reign of terror in France, when Anacharsis 
Clootz led his motley representatives of the whole human 
race to do homage to the French Republic, and the Arch- 
bishop of Paris abjured Christianity ; as the victory of super- 
stition would bring us into a resemblance with the former 
condition of Spain, when rejoicing, as her king did, in the 
title of the " Most Catholic" among the subject monarchs of 
the Romish See, the country saw absolutism filling the throne, 
and the Inquisition filling every other place. Utilitarianism, 
the first of these evil influences, would replace the Bible by 
the ledger, the Price Current, and the bank note list. Pas- 
sion, the second, would fill our hands with the viol, the song- 
book, and the stiletto, or perchance the bowie-knife. The 
third, or lawlessness, would compel every man to put on 
sword and pouch, and turn robber and homicide in self-de- 
fence, snatching what he could and standing sentry over his 
spoils. The reign of a liberalism, such as we have seen in 
Germany, would send us to the study of Polyglott grammars, 
and furnish us for our religious reading with a manual of 
Pantheistic Philosophy ; while the domination of the fifth 
would give us the chaplet of beads, and the Index of pro- 
hibited books to guide our prayers, and direct our studies ; 
and meanwhile the Inquisition would take under its paternal 
charge the erring and refractory press. But acting, as we 
have said, not separately, but conjointly, it is more difficult 
to predict the coming history of our literature. The several 
causes we have indicated will, when acting as antagonist 
forces, hardly neutralize, although they may often exaspe- 
rate each other ; and some of them are likely ultimately to 
acquire the ascendency over and extinguish the others. 

The influence of a demoralized and demoralizing literature 
it is scarce possible to portray in too gloomy colors. There 
were days in the history of revolutionary France when it 
would have been difficult to say which had been the more 
destructive engine, the press as worked by Marat, or the 
guillotine as managed by Robespierre. If the one was reek- 
ing continually with fresh blood, and heaped up its hecatombs 
of the dead, the other ran with a more deadly venom, that 
corroded the hearts of the living. Our cheap press, from its 
powers of diffusive influence, would make a literature that 
should be merely frivolous, and not flagrantly vicious, one 
of no little harm to the mental soundness of the nation. A 
race of heroes, such as Plutarch portrays, could never grow 



32 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

up if fed only on the spoonmeats and syllabubs of an elegant 
literature, and finding their entertainment in the lispings and 
pulings of a feeble sentimentalism. If the press be more 
than frivolous, if it have become licentious, its ravages on a 
reading community, and in a free country — and such a com- 
munity and country God has made ours — are incalculable. 
For character and private peace, for honesty and morals, for 
the domestic charities, and for life itself, there /emains no 
asylum on earth, when such a press is allowed to run a muck 
against the victims that its caprice, its interest or its pique 
may select. There have been newspapers circulating in 
Christian America, that would have been hailed in the cities 
of the plain, on the day ere the avenging fires fell from 
Heaven, as the utterances of no uncongenial spirit, the work 
of men morally acclimated to breathe that atmosphere of 
putridity and death. There have been seen, as editors, men 
whose hearts seem to have become first ossified, and then 
carious, in the exercise of their vocation, alike hardened in 
feeling and corrupted in principle, men who had no mercy, no 
conscience and no shame. And such men have been not only 
suffered but applauded, courted and bribed, while " a reading 
public," to use a phrase of the times, has been found to 
gather eagerly around the moral slaughter-houses, over which 
such spirits presided ; and has delighted itself in snuffing the 
fumes of each fresh sacrifice, feeding on the garbage, and 
drenching their souls in the puddles there supplied. The 
extent of the moral taint already spread from such foul 
sources of corruption, who can estimate ? Were such to 
become the pervading and controlling spirit of our literature, 
that literature, and the. society which sustains it, must col- 
lapse and perish, a loathsome mass of festering corruption. 

For a profligate literature destroys itself and the commu- 
nity who patronize it. Let literature be sold into bondage 
to immorality, and its days are thenceforward numbered, as 
well by the very nature of the human mind, as by the laws 
of the divine government. Genius, when grinding, like a 
blind Samson, in the prison-house of vice, ultimately per- 
ishes in its task, and leaves no heir. It may not so seem at 
first. A delirious frenzy may appear to call forth fresh elo- 
quence and harmony, and every Muse, dissolute and shame- 
less, may wave aloft the thyrsus of a mad Bacchante. Science 
and art, and wit and eloquence, have thus aided in the erec- 
tion of shrines to immorality ; but they have languished and 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 33 

died amid their toils. 4» profligate people soon ceases to be 
intelligent, and their literature loses all living power, all 
ability to perpetuate itself. The literature of the dead past 
is soon all that remains to a vicious community. And when 
the proudest monument of unprincipled talent and perverted 
genius has been completed, and stood perfect in beauty, its 
last chapiter -carved and fixed, its topmost pinnacle glittering 
on high, its last statue polished and fitted in its appointed 
niche, the nation may have exulted in the splendor of their • 
immoral poetry, and eloquence and art. But that nation, 
even in the hour of its triumph, stands before its trophies, 
bereft of the talents that had aided in its work, desolate and 
lone, like him who reared from its ruins the city of palm- 
trees, the fated city over which hung the old but unslumber- 
ing curse of Heaven. His children fell as the walls of his 
new foundation rose ; and he stood at the last in the home 
he had reared, a solitary man, with none to inherit his labors 
— "For Hiel the Bethelite in those days built Jericho. He 
laid the foundations thereof in Abiram, his first-born, and 
set up the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub." Lite- 
rature slays its children, when building under God's curse. 
Talent prostituted in the cause of vice pines amid its suc- 
cesses and dies ; and an imbruted community, it is generally 
seen, by a just retribution of Providence, soon buries in ob- 
livion the literature that has corrupted and barbarized it. 

Whether, then, we love the cause of letters or of religion, 
whether our country or its honor, whether science or piety 
be dear to us, we need to dread a depraved literature, and we 
have cause with jealousy to watch every influence that may 
threaten to work such corruption. We have seen that perils 
of this kind are not wanting amongst us. 

II. But where, it may be asked, is the remedy of the evils 
that beset us, and against these perils is it in our power to 
find and apply any preservative ? 

Such defence, we reply then, against the possible corrup- 
tion of our literature is not, amongst us at least, to be found 
in legislation. We look with jealousy on every thing that 
seems to abridge the freedom of the press. And, again, 
legislation is with us but the emanation of the popular taste. 
When that taste has itself become vitiated, it will of course 
hardly seek to reform itself, or submit to the necessary re- 
strictions. Nor is there a sufficient guard in education. Our 
newspapers are in this land almost an integral part of our 

6 



84 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

education, and no process that reached the schools only and 
not the journals of the land would be sufficient. And our 
scholastic education is itself but the utterance of the moral 
taste and fashion of the times, and will therefore be very- 
slow to detect and check its own deficiencies. Nor is there 
hope for us in philosophy. That never yet reached the masses, 
and often in the classes it has reached, it has been like the 
Epicurean philosophy in Roman society, a fermenting prin- 
ciple that hastened the decay and dissolution of the common- 
wealth. Not in general knowledge, for that may be the 
knowledge of evil quite as much as of good, and the intelli- 
gence that stores the head and neglects the heart, has cursed 
many, but saved none. And if all these resources are insuf- 
ficient, what have we left ? 

The remedy that shall guard and purge, and invigorate 
and fructify our literature, must have power, and to possess 
power it must come from without ; not from man, not from 
society — but from something older, higher and mightier than 
society or man. But to avail with us, it must not only have 
power, but popular power. Our government is a govern- 
ment of popular opinion, and no doctrine that confines itself 
to the schools or to certain select classes in society, a sacer- 
dotal or an aristocratic class, can suffice. It must also have 
permanent power, and be beyond the reach of change from 
the changing customs and fashions of the time. And where 
shall such a remedy be found ; rebuking a cold utilitarianism, 
curbing the fierceness of passion, awing the lawless, enlight- 
ening and shaming the falsely liberal, and emancipating the 
slave of superstition ? Looking at the variety and complexity 
of the evils to be overcome, where, it may be asked, shall we 
seek it? Human authority is insufficient, and mortal wisdom 
is dumb. Yet we believe that such a principle of recovery 
and conservatism exists, and one that has in perfection all 
the several elements needed to success. It has power ; for 
it comes from God and stretches into eternity — popular 
power ; for it was made by the maker of man's heart, and 
has in all ages of history and amid all varieties of culture 
proved its power over the masses, and commended itself to 
the hearts of the people — -permanent power ; for it has lasted 
while empires have fallen, and sects and schools of philoso- 
phy have risen, vaunted, flourished, faded and been forgotten. 
It claims all times, and its rewards and denunciations are 
fetched from beyond the grave and lay hold upon another 



IN OUR LITERATURE, 35 

world. Is it again asked : Where is this remedial agent — 
this branch of healing for the bitter waters, the Marah foun- 
tains of our literature ? 

We answer : It is the cross of Christ. Let us not shrink 
to say it. 

The Cross of Christ is the only Conservative 
Principle of our Literature. 

Towards this point, as will be seen, all our earlier remarks 
have tended ; and it will furnish the theme of all that yet 
remain to be made. Nothing else can save our literature. 
This can — though alone, it is sufficient. The cross of Christ, 
we say it again, is the only conservative principle of our lite- 
rature. Nor let any be startled. Bacon spoke of Theology 
as the haven of all science. It was said by a highly gifted 
woman, Madame de Stael, who cannot be charged as a pro- 
fessional or prejudiced witness in the matter, that the whole 
history of the world resolved itself naturally into two great 
eras, that before Christ's coming, and that which has followed 
his advent. And we find John von Midler, a distinguished 
scholar and historian of Germany, holding this language as 
to his favorite science, in which he had made such eminent 
proficiency. Animadverting on a defect of Herder in his 
"Philosophy of History," "I find," said Mtiller, "every 
thing there but Christ, and what is the history of the world 
without Christ?" 11 

And in fact the whole history of our world has looked 
forward or backward to the fatal tree reared on grim Gol- 
gotha. The oblation there made had the promise and immu- 
table purpose of God with it to insure its efficacy over the 
whole range of man's history antecedent and subsequent, 
and along the whole course of the Mystery of Divine Prov- 
idence, as seen in the government of the world. 

Let us, we entreat you, be understood. By the Cross of 
Christ we do not mean the imaged cross, as borne on the 
banners of the Inquisition, with the emblems of Judgment 
and Mercy floating over the scenes of the Auto da Fe, where 
the judgment was without justice, and the mercy was a mere 
lie. 12 Nor the Cross as borne on the shoulder of the cru- 



11 Tholuck in Princeton Bibl. Repertory, vol. iv., p. 229. 

12 A rugged and knotty cross, with the sword of Justice displayed on one 
side and the olive branch of Mercy on the other, was the device borne on the 
banner of the Spanish Inquisition, and its motto was, " Arise, O Lord, and 
plead thine own cause." Limborchi Histor. Znq. Amstd.) 1692, (p. 370.) 



36 



CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 



sader, whilst, pleading the name of Christ, he moved through 
scenes of rapine and massacre to lay his bloody hand on the 
Holy Sepulchre. Nor do we mean the cross, as, carved and 

The inscription on that of the Inquisition at Goa was " Misericordia et Jus- 
titia,'' and its emblem a figure of St. Dominic, with the right hand proffering 
the olive branch and the left displaying the sword. (Ibidem.) 

The remark in the text, on the utter falsehood of the claims made by the 
Inquisition to mercy, refers mainly to its usual forms in passing judgment. 
As the canonical law forbids ecclesiastics from shedding blood, the clerical 
jvdgcs of that tremendous tribunal were accustomed in handing over the 
heretic to the secular courts for execution, to annex the earnest recommen- 
dation that he should be treated by these secular judges with mercy, and not 
harmed in life or limb, whilst expecting and even requiring that these ex© 
cutioners of their will should destroy limbs and life in the fire. 

Llorente, in his history of the Spanish Inquisition, animadverts severely 
on this hollow and heartiess mockery of Christian tenderness. It appears in 
a very prominent manner on the singular records which Limboreh, an earlier 
and Protestant historian, published as an appendix to his History, containing 
the sentences of the Inquisition established at Toulouse, in France, and 
among whose victims were found many of the Albigenses and \\ aldenses. 
The sentences are the identical records of the Sacred Office, at. Toulouse, 
from 1307 to 1323. "They deserved," is the remark of Gibbon (Decline and 
Fall, chap, liv.), "a more learned and critical editor." The elaborate work 
of Rev. S. R. Maitland, librarian to the Archbishop of Canterbury, upon the 
Waldensian history, entitled, " Facts and Documents illustrative of the His- 
tory, Doctrines, and Rites of the ancient Albigenses and Waldenses, Lon- 
don, 1S32," lays great stress, and justly, on this record, which it describes, 
"as less known than it deserves to be." Speaking of other documents, 
Maitland remarks — "In fact, I have brought forward the public documents 
hitherto noticed very principally with a view to authenticate and illustrate 
this one, which I consider to be the fullest, and the most decisive. Of its 
genuineness, I believe there never has been, and never can be, any doubt." 
(P. 213-)* 

* Although we do not remember that Maitland alludes to the fact, the MS. of these 
records of the Toulouse Inquisition seems to have passed into England. In a work ed- 
ited by T. Forster, London. 1830, and entitled, " Original L<(tir.< of L<>ck>. Algernon 
Sidnt y, and Ant hotly. Lord Shaftesbury," a manuscript (evidently that which Lim- 
boreh used), is described as forming part of the large library of an English merchant 
Bottled at Rotterdam, by the name of Benjamin Furly. In a catalogue o\ his library. ;is 
sold by auction in 1714, the parchment volume is "spoken of as being, "of all rarest 
books the most rare, ana beyond valuation" (Pref. pp. cxviii, cxix.) Having been at 
the sale bought in by the family, a son of Furly sold it " to Archbishop Seeker for the 
British Museum," p. cxix. Furly, its proprietor, Was one of the early Quakers, a 
learned man. and author, with Geome Fox and Stubbs, of that strange and erudite attack 
on the complimentary use of the plural you, in addressing a single individual, entitled 
u A Battledore/or Teachers and Professors to learn Singular and Plural ;" and was in 
habits of intimacy with Locke, when in Holland, and with Le Clerc and Limboreh. 
To this remarkable Manuscript and its contents. Locke, in the correspondence pub- 
lished in the above volume of Forster (a Catholic descendant of the Quaker Furly), 
Beems to allude, pp. 21, 26, 29. 30, and 32. On the publication of Limborch'8 volume, 
Locke presented copies of it to his English friends (p. 54), and amongst others to Kid- 
der. Bishop of Hath and Wells. If Seeker were the purchaser, it would seem that the 
library of the Archbishop of Canterbury, rather than that of the British Museum, would 
be the place of deposit fortius ancient Register. A Manuscript collection of similar 
Inquisitorial Records is frequently quoted by a living scholar of France. C. Schmidt, 
Theological Professor in the Protestant Seminary o\' Strasburgh, in his " Histotre des 
Cathares ou Albigeeie, 2 vote. Paris, 1849." It is the great Doat Collection, in several 
folio volumes of manuscript, preserved in the " Bioliotheque NationaleJ 1 at Paris 
{Schmidt } vo\. L, pp. viii, and 382), and being transcripts made in 1G69 by Jean de 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 37 

gilded, it is seen glittering on the spires of a cathedra], or 
hung in jewels and gold around the maiden's neck, or em- 

Amongst their victims was John Philibert, a priest of the Romish church, 
who had, after having been sent to apprehend a fugitive Waldensian, become, 
himself, a convert to the sect. The Church " having nothing more in her 
power to do against him adequate to his demerits" {cum ecclesia ultra non 
habeat quid facial pro tuis demeritis contra te), pronounced sentence of degra- 
dation from the priesthood; and, upon his degradation, that he should be 
abandoned to the judgment of the secular court, at the same time " affec- 
tionately beseeching such secular court, as the requirements of the canon law 
demand, to preserve to thee life and limbs unharmed" (eandem affecluose ro- 
gaides prout suadent canonical sanctiones ut tibi vitam et membra ULibata con- 
scrvct.) Limborch, p. 255. Two other Waldensians are, with the same gentle 
phraseology and earnest entreaty, committed to the secular court. — (p. 265.) 
In the recorded degradation of Philibert from his priestly office (p. 275), the 
recommendation of mercy is repeated with new emphasis. The seneschal 
of Toulouse, the secular judge into whose hands he passes, is "earnestly 
required and entreated to moderate his sentence regarding the heretic, so 
that it extend not to peril of death or mutilation of limb." (Ipsum tamen 
instanter requirimus et rogamus ut citra mortis periculum et membri mutita- 
tionem suam circa te sentcntiam moderetur.) A husband and wife, Walden- 
sians, are again committed to the mercies of the secular tribunal in the like 
select and chary phrases (p. 291). A similar affectionate entreaty {affectuose 
rogantcs) is used in delivering a female Waldensian to the chief judge of the 
king, the lieutenant of the seneschal of Toulouse (p. 381), and two Beguins 
to the same secular judge (p. 336), and yet two other Beguins, who are relin- 
quished into the same hands (p. 393). 

It was, then, part of the gracious etiquette of the Inquisitorial tribunal, like 
Pilate, at the sentence of Christ, to wash her hands clean of the blood of 
those she gave up. More eager than Pilate, she insisted on the penalty she 
required others to inflict. But chary as she was of allowing the violent death 
which followed to appear as her act, or to stain her records, the truth breaks 
out in several places on the same records; as where one Petrus Lucensis, 
who abjured his errors, speaks of some earlier victims of the Inquisition as 
having been condemned by the inquisitors and prelates of the Roman church, 
and " left to the secular arm and burnt" {condemnati per inquisitor es et pre- 
latos ecclesiaz Romano?) et relicti seculari brachio et combusti), p. 360. The 
formula of abandonment to the secular arm was followed by the stake as its 
invariable sequent — " condemnati et per sccularcm curiam combusti" pp. 310, 
313, 319, 320, 323, &c. 

And the inquisitors not only expected -this sequent, but, as it appears from 
Llorente's history of the kindred Inquisition in Spain, they required and 
enforced it. It is from the second edition of his original work, as published 
at Paris, in 1818, in 4 vols. 8vo., and not from the American re-print of his 
abridged work, that we quote. The sentence of the Inquisition, he remarks, 
closes with a prayer to the judges to treat the sufferer with humanity (I. 122) ; 
but there were> he observes, several instances in which the secular magis- 
trate, choosing to take the inquisitors at their word, and to suppose their 

Doat, Conseiller du roi, from the registers of the Inquisition at Alby, Carcasonne, 
Toulouse, Narbonne, &c, in their proceedings against the Albigenses. Schmidt hoped 
that the triumph of freedom In Italy would soon give access for similar researches into 
the mediseval history of the Inquisition in that country. A re-issue of the Toulouse 
MS. in England, with such annotations as Gibbon wished, and a free collation of the 
Doat materials in France, were greatly to be desired. Schmidt, whose own work seems 
the result of great research, seems disposed severely to criticise the cotemporary treatise 
of the German scholar Halm, on the kindred theme of the Heretics of the Middle Agos.j 



d» CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

broidered on the slipper of a pontiff. 13 The cross, as we 
understand it, has no sympathy with a religion of shows and 
spectacles, of mummeries and pageants, of incense and music, 
and long-drawn aisles, and painted windows, and gorgeous 
pictures, and precious statuary. . 

language sincere, did not send the culprit to punishment, and the judge was, 
in consequence, arraigned himself, as one suspected of heresy (I. 125). " The 
prayer, then," it is his language that we use, "was but a vain formality, dic- 
tated by hypocrisy." (Ibid.) So again, in animadverting on the case of 
Marine de Guevara (II. 253, 254), he exclaims, "Who would not be moved 
with indignation to see this act of the tribunal closing with a recommenda- 
tion, on the part of the inquisitors, to the royal judge in ordinary, that he 
should use with the accused, gentleness and mercy, whilst they were not 
ignorant as to what was to ensue 7 * * * If, on the condemned being 
placed in the hands of the corregidor, this officer should allow himself to 
sentence the victim to perpetual imprisonment in some fortress, instead of 
sentencing to capital punishment, they would have carried their complaints 
to the king, and perhaps even have launched, their censures against him, and 
have brought him to judgment as one guilty of having opposed himself to 
the measures of the holy office — of having violated his oath to lend to them 
aid and assistance, and of being a favorer of heretics. What, then, means 
this hypocritical affectation? * * It is for their purposes to induce the belief 
that they have no share in the death of the accused, who is their neighbor, 
and that thus they have not incurred the penalties of ecclesiastical irregu- 
larity, pronounced against those priests who have had a share in the death 
of any person." Llorente, it will be remembered, was a Romanist; had, 
himself, been for years an officer of the Inquisition ; and wrote with its re- 
cords before him. 

Of such infamous jugglery with truth and the forms of Christian kindness 
it is not, then, harsh to say, that "its mercy was a mere lie." 

Several of the victims of the French Inquisition are charged, amongst 
other offences, with confessing their sins to Waldensian or other pastors, 
"who, as they knew, were not priests ordained by any bishop of the Romish 
church."— Limborch, pp. 264, 226, 230, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 
290, &c. The tenet of apostolic succession, as coming through Rome, and 
necessary to a valid ministry, was then one element in the storm of wrath 
that burst upon these sufferers. One of them, Raymond Dominic, who 
seems to have been arraigned in 1322, is charged, amongst other errors, with 
holding that " the baptism of water, given by the Church to boys, was of no 
worth, because the boys consented not, but rather wept." We give the mis- 
spelt Latin of the Inquisitorial scribe : " Item quod baptismus aquefacius per 
ecclesiam pueris nichil valebat, quia pueri non consenciebant ymo Jtcbant" — p. 
348. He and his wife had been fugitives for eleven years. When asked 
why, at his first citation, he had not appeared and confessed, but fled, he 
replied, it was from pity for his seven children of either sex, for whom he 

13 " The Pope is present. He is seated on a throne or chair of state; the 
cardinals, in succession, approach and kiss his hand, retire one step, and 
make, three bows or nods: one to him in front, and one on the right hand, 
and another on the left ; which, I am told, are intended for him (as the per- 
sonification of the Father), and for the Son, and for the Holy Ghost, on 
either side of him ; and all the cardinals having gone through these motions, 
and the interior priests having kissed his toe — that is, the cross embroidered 
on his shoe— high muss begins." 

Rome in the Nineteenth Century, 

Harper's Edition, vol. ii., pages 246, %A7, 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 39 

r But by this title, we mean the cross, naked, rugged, and 
desolate, not pictured, save on the eye of faith, and upon 
the pages of scripture — not graven but by the ringer of the 
Spirit on the regenerate heart ; the cross as Paul preached 

feared that they would die of hunger if he and his wife had been then im- 
prisoned, and that he proposed to come in and confess when his children 
should have become able»to help themselves. — p. 349. So also his wife, being 
asked the reason of their flight, replied, it was chiefly from love and pity for 
their little boys — "propter amor em et compassionem puerorum suorum par- 
vulorum" — who would perish of hunger. — p. 250. Such incidents reveal 
some of the scenes of domestic anguish this ruthless tribunal created. 

The same records of the Tribunal at Toulouse may throw some light on a 
question lately agitated — whether the oath of the Romish bishop, taken at 
his consecration, is to be translated as requiring of him the persecution of 
heretics. In the proceedings of the French Inquisition we find the Latin 
word in question occurring in the oaths taken of the secular magistrates to 
aid the Inquisition in the detection and suppression of heresy ; in the pen- 
ances assigned those who recanted their heresy and were to prove their sin- 
cerity by informing against and delivering up others; in the forms of abjura- 
tion imposed upon penitents ; and in the complaints of the sufferers against 
the Romish church for its treatment of them ; and again in the sta f ement by 
her own officers, of that church's conduct towards errorists. On page 1, the 
secular magistrates of Toulouse, under the French King, are sworn to defend 
the faith of the holy Roman Church, and to "pursue (or persecute) and take, 
and cause to be taken, accuse and denounce to the church and inquisitors, 
heretics, their disciples, favorers, and harborers — "hereticos credentes, J auto- 
res et receptalores eorumdem persequemur" &c. This was sworn on the 
Holy Gospels of God, and a similar oath was taken of the " consules" of Tou- 
louse, p. 1. Similar oaths may be found imposed on the secular tribunals, 
in pp. 292, 334, &c. So those admitted to penance, on recantation, are 
charged, " Prceterea persequamini fiereticos quibuscunque nominibus censean- 
tur et credentes et fautores et receptatores et defensor es eorum" to persecute 
heretics, by whatever names they be designated, and their disciples, favorers, 
harborers and defenders, p. 341 ; and a similar penance, on p. 347, includes 
also " fugitives for heresy. 3 ' A William Garrick, Professor of Laws, admit- 
ted to penance, but banished from the kingdom of France, in the year 1321, 
"swears and promises to the best of his power, to persecute heretics of every 
condemned sect, and those whom he knows or believes to be fugitives for 
heresy, and to cause them, to the best of his power, to be apprehended and 
delivered up to the inquisitors of heretical pravity. 5 ' — p. 283. Certain offend- 
ers, condemned to imprisonment, "abjure heresy and swear to keep, hold 
and defend the orthodox faith — to persecute heretics and their favorers, and 
to disclose and reveal them wherever known to be." — p. 202. A relapsed 
Waldensian is charged with falsifying his oath, "par ere mandatis ecclesiae et 
inquisitorum et persequi Valdenses et alios hereticos" to obey the mandates 
of the church and its inquisitors, and persecute Waldensians and other here- 
tics, and is charged with thus returning, tanquam canis ad vomitum. — p. 254. 
So the church, describing her own conduct, uses the same word. Philibert, 
already named, one of their own priests, whom the purer faith of the Wal- 
densians had won over, is charged with holding these Waldensians to be 
good men and a good sect, and of good faith in which men might be saved, 
" although he knew that the Roman Church and the inquisitors of heretics per- 
secuted and condemned them." — quamvis sciret quod ecclesia Romana et 

INQUISITORES HERETICORUM PERSEQUERENTUR IPSOS ET CONDEMrNARENT. 

Here is the church describing herself.— p. 254, John Brayssan, another of 



40 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

it, ami the first Christians receircd it. This doctrine, wo 
suppose to bare two aspects. The first, Christ crucified, as 

becoming our free and full justification by a blood that pur- 
ges from all sin, and avails tor the world.* It was the reas- 

theae Waldensians, is charged with belonging to that sect of Waldensians, or 
Poor Men of Lyons, w which the sacred Romish church, mother and mistress 
of all (churches), long since has condemned as heretical, and the same, as 
being truly such, j tmsacrosancta Romana tcclesia 

nutter omni:. Etccftim tanquam kereticam condtmpn 

TAHQl am vna: r.vii'M PSSSSQUITUS BT CONDEMPNAT. p. 20#. So, tOO, the 

complaints of tin' Buflerers use the same word. The Waldensians are repre- 
sented as asserting rashly [Umtrwrvt oseertm/), "that the sacred Roman 

church sins and deals with them unlaw fully and unjustly, because it 

p, "JO 7. 
Another, John Chauoat, of the same hapless sect, is charged, amongst his 
other misdemeanors, with saying and asserting {tUds t ass( ris) r "that those 
who persecute these same ( w . s ?), to wit, the prelates of the Roman 
church and the inquisitors of heretical pravity, act unjustly, and in unright- 
eously apprehending them and detaining them, and In giving up to the secu- 
lar arm those who will nor desert that sect."- p, 263, We have seen, and 
the martyrs Of the valleys felt, what the inquisitors eall their "eanonieal 
sanetions," which, amongst other things, required the use of a heartless form 
oi mercy, while giving up the victim to merciless tortures and death. We 
need not be surprised to find, though the Inquisitors seem to regard it as 
unaccountable temerity, that these ** — A the aforesaid sect, 

wandering from the right path, neither receives nor regards as ot any worth, 
hut spurns, rejects, and contemns* 1 {sptrnu\ ••, pp. 263 

and 207. Familiar as were those blessed confessors with the Bible, they 
probably recollected, in connexion^ with at least this portion ot the venerable 
" eanonieal sanetions," the language of the Psalmist, an earlier sufferer : " His 
words were softer than oil. yet were they drawn swords." >s - Iv. 21.) 

If the Episcopal oath is, then, to be construed by the analogy o( other 
ancient usage oi the word on the part oi' the same ehnreh, we can be at no 
loss as to its signification. The word, "persecution" is become, through the 
tant influence, an odious term. Many excellent Catholics, 
as individuals, repudiate the thing itself, Hut, as Bishop Hopkins, oi Ver- 
mont, has shown in his 9th lecture on the Reformation, the Roman church 
has authoritatively established persecution as her duty. Individuals have no 
right to create or decide the doctrine o( the church. She claims infallibility 
and immutability ; and, although from the force oi public opinion and the 
Stances, she may allow certain doctrines and claims to re- 
main in abeyance, they wait but the fitting season to revive and reclaim 
their old influence. And what the supreme Pontiff; himself, judges of such 
individual and modem modifications of the old doctrines we may augur from 
that Encyclical letter issued by the reigning Pontiff of our own tim< s 

\ \ I . in • 

3). Writing the Virgin Mary, 

whose aid he in\ >) by her heavenly 

ation, into salutary counsels (p. 356), he reminds the bishops and dig- 
nitari in the language of his canonized p in the 

fid that 

< 

• 

;. Rejecting, therefore, 

Indignantly, the proposed restoration and regeneration suggested by some, 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 41 

sertion of this doctrine which wrought the glorious Refor- 
mation. The second, Christ crucified, as the principle of 
our sanctijication, under the influences of the renewing 
Spirit, that conforms the believer to his Lord, and crucifies 

as necessary to the well-being of the church (p. 36S), he denounces as " an 
absurd and erroneous sentiment, or rather the ravings of delirium, the opinion, 
that, for everyone whatever, is to be claimed and defended, the, liberty of 
conscience." — p. 376 ; " to which most pestilent error {peslilcntissimo errori)," 
he goes on to remark, "the way has been prepared by that full and unbounded 
liberty of opinion which prevails widely, to the injury of the church and the 
commonwealth ; some with extreme impudence pronouncing that from it are to 
flow advantages to religion." — p. 376. Reading history by lights of his own, 
he proceeds to declare that "experience has shown, from the earliest antiquity, 
tliat States, the most eminent in wealth, power, and glory, have fallen by this 
one evil, the ungoverned freedom of opinion, license of discourse, and the 
love of innovation ." — p. 376. "To the same class," he proceeds, "is to be 
referred that worst and never enough to be execrated, and detestable (deterrima 
ac nunqua?n satis exsccranda et detestabilis,) liberty of the press" 
{libertas artis libraries). — p. 378. We must close our quotations, but such 
language proves distinctly that the principles of toleration and freedom that, 
in our country, have made persecution for religion unpopular, are not yet 
the principles of the Romish See. Individuals may disavow and repudiate 
the use of force to compel religious uniformity; but, with such declarations 
before us, from the head of the Romish Church, the very " Seat of Verity 
and Unity," as the Romanists term it, it requires great heedlessness, or 
singular credulity, to suppose that Rome has changed her principles, how- 
ever she may vary her policy or modify her tactics to the emergencies of the 
time and the scene. 

That Rome has not repented of the blood she shed in former centuries, for 
the suppression of heresy, the same document sufficiently attests, where, in 
the face of all history, and in spite of admissions as to their moral excellence, 
made by such high Catholic authority as Bossuet, the reigning Pontiff goes 
on to speak of the" Waldensians, and other sons of Belial of the same class" 
(aliorumque hujusmodi fliorum Belial), as being the "filth and shame of the 
human race" (qui humani generis sordes ac dedecora mere), and "therefore 
deservedly so often smitten by the anathema of the Seat of the Apostles. — p. 388. 
It is not for any man to use such language of such confessors of Christ, 
and especially for one holding the seat once stained by Alexander VI., to talk 
so unreservedly of " the filth of the human race." 

He might well remember that the connexion of his own Pontifical line 
with the Borgias of the one sex, and the Marozias of the other, is a fact 
much later and surer, as to the evidence establishing it, and the influence 
emanating from it — both much nearer and much clearer, than the Apocry- 
phal claim that line has set up of apostolic descent and authority. To an 
American Christian it affords but little evidence of the possession of an 
" apostolical seat," or the inheritance of an apostolical spirit, to have launched 
such butchery of old, and to scatter such Billingsgate now, upon 

" O, Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains, cold ; 
E'en them who kept thy truth so pure of old. 

* * * * 

Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient, fold 
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled 
Mother with infant down the rocks." 

* * * * 

7 Milton. 



42 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

his evil nature within him. Thus it was that Christ was not 
only crucified himself, but required a]so every disciple to 
come after him, taking up also his own cross, and Paul 
speaks of himself as crucified unto the world. This last 
aspect of the doctrine of the cross, we have thought, has 
been rather overlooked by some of the Reformers, in their 
zeal against self-righteousness, and against a false and asce- 
tic piety. Such was Cecil's opinion, 14 whom none can sus- 
pect of any want of reverent feeling for the Reformers. But 

14 " Man is a creature of extremes, * * * * Popish heresy of hu- 
man merit in Justification, drove Luther on the other side into most unwar- 
rantable and unscriptural statements of that doctrine." — CeciVs Works, 
N. Y. 1825. Vol. iii., p. 419. 

" The leading defect in Christian ministers is want of a devotional 
habit. The Church of Rome made much of this habit. The contest 
accompanying and following the Reformation, with something of an indis- 
criminate enmity against some of the good of that Church, as well as the 
evil, combined to repress this spirit in the Protestant writings ; whereas the 
mind of Christ seems, in fact, to be the grand end of Christianity in its 
operation upon man." — Ibid., p. 308. 

" A want of the spirit of the cross in its professors increases the offence of 
the cross — that humility, patience and love to souls, which animated Christ 
when he offered himself on the cross for the sins of the world." — Ibid.. 
p. 381. 

The works of an Irish clergyman, the Rev. Henry Woodward, a writer of 
genius and piety, an original thinker, and a determined Protestant, contain 
some remarks to the same effect. -As his writings are little known in the 
American Churches, we shall append a lengthened extract. It is made 
from his " Essays and Sermons. Fourth edition London, 1844." (Vol. i., 
pp. 5-14.) 

"Justification by faith, or that free forgiveness which is offered, without 
our own deservings, through the righteousness of Christ, has, we all know, 
been styled by a great authority the 'articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesice.' 
But, profoundly important and absolutely essential as this great doctrine is, 
still it may be questioned whether its rank, comparatively with other doc- 
trines, is not higher in the scale of Protestantism than in that of the Scrip- 
ture revelation generally ; whether in other words, it does not occupy a, 
more prominent part in the system of Christianity, as opposed to Popery, 
than in the system of Christianity, considered in itself. On the denial, or at 
least on the practical rejection of that vital doctrine, the fabric of Romanism 
was built ; and, consequently, its vindication and re-establishment were felt 
by the reformers as no less than ' life from the dead.' Like the man who 
rejoices over his one lost sheep when found, more than over the ninety-and- 
nine which went not astray, they naturally prized this article of the faith 
once delivered to the saints, as if Christianity had centred in that alone. 
But, assuredly, if the first Protestants had been called to fight their battles 
With a church which oppugned, not only justification by faith, but the unity 
Of the Godhead — or the divinity of Christ — or the personality and inspiration 
of the Holy Spirit — or a future state of rewards and punishments — they 
would not, in that case, have suffered their zeal to run so exclusively in the 
channel ofwh.it is termed, emphatically, evangelical doctrine. 

" However this may be, certain it is, that in the controversial attitude into 
Which the opposing force of Popery has thrown us, we take our stand, as 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 43 

if we look to the New Testament, it is very evident that 
both were blended in the doctrine as the early Christians 
received it The cross was not only their confidence, but 
the model of their conformity. It is, we have supposed, a 
defect here — a neglect of aiming at this high standard of 
devotedness, on the part of many of us Protestants, that has 

Protestants, in an especial manner, upon the impregnable ground of justifi- 
cation by faith alone. To maintain this position, we know that no weapon 
can avail, but ' the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God ;' and, in 
rightly dividing the word of truth, we direct against the advocates of human 
intercessors and human merits that portion of the sacred canon which most 
clearly states the terms of our acceptance with God. Hence has resulted 
the pre-eminence which many of our writers have given to the epistles, 
above even the gospels themselves : a station which, I am convinced, they 
could not have held, but for the relative position in which the Protestant 
churches are placed. And hence, also, has resulted the comparative rank 
with which not only the writings, but the character of St. Paul, have been 
generally invested. Amongst mere human beings, I fully grant, that none 
can, deservedly, be placed higher. But it may, perhaps, be questioned, 
whether the example of this great apostle has not obtained an influence 
which no mere man should exercise over a large proportion of the Protestant 
mind. It is my firm conviction, that many of our religious professors shape 
their habits of feeling and of living after the pattern, rather of St. Panl, than 
of the blessed Jesus. 

" I do not. mean that this is done by any, consciously, and of set purpose : 
nor do I charge the most restless spirit which stirs in the religious bustle of 
the day, with a premeditated design to set the disciple above his Master, or 
to honor the creature more than the Creator. But, that numbers form their 
tastes, and take the standard of their duties, from the life of St. Paul, 
rather than from the life of Christ, I judge, from effects and fruits, to be 
accounted for on no other principle. The present state of the religious world 
is, in fact, precisely what might be expected, if there were a general agree- 
ment to erect the former, instead of the latter, into the grand exemplar. The 
imitators of Christ, and the imitators of St. Paul, be it observed, must, in 
one respect, bear a mutual resemblance ; they must both fail in equalling the 
model at which they aim. In the one instance, it would be blasphemy to 
deny it. In the other, the event is no less certain ; because those that look 
not unto Jesus must want the very principle which made the apostle of the 
Gentiles what he was. We can, then, but compare failure with failure. 
Nevertheless, I would put it to any candid and intelligent observer, whether 
a large proportion of professors, at this moment, are not more like carica- 
tures of St. Paul, than the faintest, or even the most distorted reflections of 
the mind that was in Christ Jesus; whether the spirit that animates the 
religious body does not resemble the ardor, the energy, and the impetuosity 
of the one, rather than the calmness, the composure, and the serenity of the 
other. 

" God forbid that I should mean to throw disparagement upon the charac- 
ter of the great apostle here alluded to. No human being, I believe, ever 
trod more closely in the steps of his Divine Master. In personal holiness 
he rose, perhaps, as high as is possible to man ; and in the wide extent of 
the blessings which he diffused he has confessedly no rival. Still, St. Paul 
was but a man — but one individual of the species. And as such, his charac- 
ter, when held up for general imitation, cannot fail to lead his followers— 
the far greater part at least — in a wrong direction. 



44 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

given to the Oxford Tractarian movement, and to the present 
efforts of Romanism, most of their hold upon the public 
mind. Apparent estrangement from the world, and a self- 
denial that rises superior to the ordinary idols of society, will 
commend to the respect of mankind even much error in 
those thus estranged and self-denying. It throws a glister- 

" This must, infallibly, be the effect of every human model, if too closely 
aimed at. In common life, we often see how awkwardly the most graceful 
peculiarities of one man sit upon another ; how that which appears amiable 
and natural in the original, degenerates into mere affectation in the copy. 
And so it is in the Church of Christ. Though all the members of one body, 
* yet all have not the same office :' each has his peculiar temperament, his 
distinctive character, his appropriate sphere. Some are called to lead, and 
others to follow : some are fitted for privacy and retirement, others for public 
life and active duty. In short, the shape and coloring of the Christian are 
as endlessly diversified, as are the cast and mould of our natural features. 
Hence it follows, that for all to imitate the same human pattern, is to run 
counter to the course of Providence, and to resist the operations of that 
Spirit who divideth to every man, severally, as he will. 

"And thus it is, that if I am right in the conjecture which I have 
hazarded, the reason is at once explained, why, in proportion to the quantum 
of religious agency now at work, so little solid and genuine fruit appears. 
The fault lies in this, that all are striving to do the same work ; and thus, 
instead of having an organized body, we have a multiplication of one mem- 
ber. So that if St. Paul were to descend amongst us, and repeat his well- 
known question, 'Are all apostles?' multitudes, if sincere, must rise up and 
say, ' We are — we are, at least, endeavoring to become so.' Nay, are there 
not some who might answer him in his own words, ' We suppose that we 
are not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles V 

"In spite of all our errors, there is, nevertheless, I trust in God, much of 
the invaluable material of solid and practical religion in this country. And 
if there be, partly, at least, from the cause assigned, an over-earnestness and 
activity in our system, and if the streams that flow are disproportioned to 
the fountain that should feed them, the remedy is near at hand. Let us 
leave all human cisterns, and draw at once from the fulness of Christ. Let 
us look unto Jesus, and set the Lord always before us. 

" And here I would introduce an observation, in my mind, of no small 
importance. There is, I conceive, an independent proof of our Saviour's 
divine nature, to be derived from the universal applicability of his example. 
No other pattern is suitable to all ; but his, like a master-key, fits every lock. 
Human examples are only partial exhibitions of Divine grace. They are 
moulded by their own peculiar circumstances, and fitted for the special de- 
partment they have to fill. They are, in a word, like streams which take 
their direction, and pursue their several windings, in a course tracked out for 
them, and for them alone. And hence, it is impossible for one man impli- 
citly to follow in the footsteps of another, without some unnecessary and 
unnatural deviations from that line which the order of Providence has as- 
signed him. But Christ is, as it were, an exhaustless fountain, not flowing 
in one channel, but overflowing in all directions. He is not, if I may so 
speak, an individual character : but all characters of excellence unite in him. 
In imitating Christ, no man is led out of his natural sphere, or thrown into 
a forced and affected attitude. Every movement after him is performed with 
freedom, and his likeness sits easily and becomingly upon all that bear it. 
Tiie liigh and low — the rich and poor— the gifted and the ungifted — the con- 



IN OUR LITERATURE, 45 

ing veil of sanctity even over the gross corruptions of Ro- 
manism ; and her impostures and enormities are often over- 
looked by those who see standing in her shrines her martyrs 
of charity, her Vincent de Pauls, and her Francis Xaviers. 
A pining recluse, scourging himself in sober sadness, as the 
expression of his deep sense of sin, may be a pitiable spec- 
tacle of delusion ; but he is not in the eyes of the world 
generally, as odious a sight as that presented by a self-satis- 
fied, self-indulgent professor of a purer creed, living in all 
ease and pleasure, conformed to the world in all its follies, 

templative and the active — all classes and all dispositions, find, in the exam- 
ple of Jesus, the teaching which they want ; and all are led, by looking unto 
him, precisely in the path most suitable for them to walk in. We see at 
once, in that comprehensive model, the bright contrast to whatever we 
should shun, and the most attractive exhibition of all that we should aim at, 
in our Christian course. Whatever our besetting sins may be, whether of 
excess or of defect, they stand equally condemned by a comparison with 
him. Thus, the restless and over-active spirit is calmed by the contempla- 
tion of his nights of solitary prayer ; and the indolent are stimulated to exer- 
tion by his ceaseless labors of love. The high and lofty are brought low, 
when they behold their Lord and Master washing his disciples' feet ; and the 
poor in this world's goods are taught contentment by him who ' had not 
where to lay his head. 5 This subject could, indeed, be endlessly pursued. 
Enough has, I trust, been said to prove the point assumed, namely, that a 
character which can thus adapt itself, in the way of example, to every pos- 
sible variety of man; which can pour forth a healing virtue, equally applica- 
ble to the most opposite extremes ; and which can thus spread its influence 
over the wide extent of the whole human race ; that such a character cannot 
be bounded within the narrow circle of our nature, but must partake of the 
infinitude of God. 

" Let us, then, I repeat it, prepare for the impending crisis in that spirit 
which alone can enable us to meet it. Let us array ourselves in the whole 
armor of God. Let us put on the Lord Jesus Christ. All weapons of our 
own forging must fail. They have been long tried ; and they have been tried 
in vain. If we go forth against our enemies, in dependence on an arm of 
flesh, we miscalculate the force to which we are opposed. For in that case 
human adversaries are but instruments : the real controversy is with God. 
Not because he has a favor to our enemies, but because he has a favor unto 
us, and because he is a jealous God towards those who professedly maintain 
his cause. Persuaded I am, that until we throw ourselves unreservedly 
upon him — till we fall back on God, and take up our position on the Rock 
of ages, discomfiture and defeat will baffle and confound us in every effort. 

" But some may say, ' We grant these theories to be true, but what can 
individuals do ? Where is the controlling and disposing mind, to combine 
their movements and direct them to a common point?' To this, I answer, 
that there is an all-disposing Mind on high. Let us, then, do our own part. 
Let us arm ourselves with the mind that was in Christ Jesus. Let our light 
shine forth in the triumphs of his patience, the splendor of his innocence, 
and the victorious energy of his love. Let us stand thus equipped as Chris- 
tian soldiers, and we shall not want a leader. God will teach our hands to 
war, and our fingers to fight. Our cause will be the cause of Heaven ; and 
we shall go forth conquering and to conquer." 



46 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

and vaunting of a doctrinal orthodoxy that produces no emi- 
nence in holiness. Christians must live more upon the cross, 
seeing in it not only the principle of their faith, but also the 
pattern of their obedience — the cross not only as cancelling 
their sin, but also as crucifying their lusts. Such is the two- 
fold aspect of the great truth, the basis of all scriptural doc- 
trine and practice, the centre of all its mysteries and all its 
morality — the cross of Christ. 

Let us now, for a moment, turn to the history of that 
cross, in order that we may perceive more clearly its strange 
elements of power. Place yourselves, then, in imagination, 
amid the multitude, that, swayed by curiosity, or inflamed 
by hate, are rushing from the hall of judgment, and sweeping 
along their hurried and tumultuous way to the hill of cruci- 
fixion. Reeling under insults, a meek sufferer, whose head 
is bound with a crown of thorns, and his face swollen with 
blows and wet with the spewings of the mob, is threading, 
slowly and painfully, his way through that exasperated 
crowd, who are all athirst and ravening for his blood. He 
has reached the spot selected for his death. There he stands 
faint, but mute and uncomplaining, whilst the cruel prepa- 
rations are made that shall consummate the sacrifice. Amid 
shouts, and taunts, and fiercest blasphemy, he is nailed and 
lifted up. As the cross becomes erect, and he hangs at last 
before that excited multitude, methinks I see exultation, like 
a rising breeze, ruffle that sea of upturned faces. And there 
he is raised on high, how utterly friendless and abject to the 
eye of man ; for even the thieves upbraid him, that hang 
and writhe beside him. 

But were your eyes unsealed, as the prophet opened those 
of his servant at Dothan, you would discern, beside and 
above that howling rabble, a more august gathering. Le- 
gions, whose feeblest warrior would have turned to paleness 
the cheek of Caesar at the head of all his hosts, are gazing 
there ; yet withheld by some dread sentence, they do not in- 
terpose. Angels that excel in might and in glory, watch that 
desolate sufferer with adoring interest. That much outraged 
victim, seemingly rejected of man and abandoned of God, 
is my Maker. In that lowly form is veiled the incarnate 
Godhead. The angels that smote Sennacherib's host, and 
slew the first-born of Egypt, dispeopling a camp and decima- 
ting a nation in a night, have bowed often their heads to 
this being, as their Lord and their Creator. Excited as are 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 47 

his enemies, they could frame no consistent accusation against 
him to justify their enmity. There, under reproach, anguish 
and cursing, dies the only one of Adam's race that knew no 
sin. For no guilt of his own is he suffering, but to cancel 
that of his murderer, man. Thus viewed, what elements 
of grandeur and tenderness, of the loftiest splendor and the 
lowliest condescension, blend in that dread sacrifice ! Do 
men look with interest on greatness in misery ! It is here : 
the King of Glory dying as a malefactor. Are they touched 
with sympathy for distress ? How deep was the anguish 
even of his patient spirit, when he cried out, invoking a 
Father who had hidden his face ! Should wisdom attract, 
here was the great Teacher whom all Judea had admired, 
speaking as never man spake — the heavenly Teacher for 
whom Socrates had taught himself and his scholars to hope. 
He is here giving his lessons on the cross. The good man 
dying ignominiously, of whom Plato had glimpses, is here, 
the exemplar of perfect innocence, enduring the treatment 
due to consummate wickedness. That sacrifice stirs all 
worlds. Hell misses its expected prey, and the spell of oe- 
spair over the accursed earth is broken, while Heaven stoops 
to behold its King incarnate and dying, that He may recon- 
quer to his allegiance a revolted province of his empire ; in 
the same act indulging his mercy, and satisfying his justice, 
whilst his expiring breath together magnifies his law and 
enunciates his gospel. That sacrifice may well have power 
with man, for it has power with God. To the human mind, 
it presents in the closest union and in their highest energy, 
all the elements of sympathy, awe and tenderness. It blends 
a Divine majesty that might well overawe the haughtiest, 
with a winning gentleness that would reassure the most 
desponding. It may well be, at the same time, a theme for 
the mind of an angel to study, without grasping all its vast- 
ness ; and a motive for the mind of the Sabbath-school child 
to feel, without being repelled by its loftiness. It has pow- 
er, practical power — popular power — permanent power. It 
is God's remedy for sin ; and with the accompanying influ- 
ences of his Spirit, it can avail as the remedy for all forms 
of man's sin, as that sin is infused into, and as it is found 
envenoming either the literature of the world, or any other 
product of the human mind. Let us but transcribe that 
truth into the heart, and illustrate it in the life, or rather let 
the renewing grace of God's Spirit so transfer it into the 



48 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

soul of man, let me be enabled to believe in this Divine Suf 
ferer, as my Saviour — to feel that with him I am dying to 
the world, and that with him, too, I shall rise again from the 
grave, see him on the judgment throne, and follow him into 
the gates of Paradise ; and with these truths firmly grasped 
by the mind, what has the world left wherewith to allure, 
wherewith to appal me ? I have thrown myself loose from 
the trammels of earth. Its cords have perished at the touch 
of an ethereal fire. Disengaged from its entanglements, its 
bonds sundered, and its snares parted, I soar aloft, to sit, in 
the language of Paul, in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. I 
rise yet higher, and in the awful language of Peter, I, the 
heir of corruption, and once the bondsman of death, am 
made " a partaker of the divine nature." Here is power. 15 

Let that power of the cross but go forth in its appropriate 
channels, in a holy, devoted ministry — in the more elevated 
piety of the church, and in a Christian education of the 
young given by the church, if the State may not give it : — 
let that power, we say, but go forth in these channels, and 
with God's blessing upon it, the world is saved. Carry that 
truth into all the scenes of human activity, or suffering — into 
the market-place, and the halls of legislation ; into the schools 
of philosophy, and the student's cell, and the editor's desk, 
the cabins of poverty and the dungeons of crime ; let it fence 
the cradle and watch the death-bed ; and it will be found 
equal to every task, competent to every emergency, and 

15 It has been promised at times that the removal from the Christian 
system of its old, orthodox doctrines, as to the Atonement and Deity of our 
Saviour, would, and it alone could, conciliate the favor of men of taste and 
refinement. The language of Lessing, himself unhappily a sceptic, but a 
critic of the highest name in German literature for taste and judgment, 
would not sustain such promises. It has been quoted by Pye Smith, in his 
Scripture Testimony to the Messiah (2d ed. Lond. 1829, vol. iii., p. 236), 
" I agree with you, that our old religious system is false ; but I cannot say, 
as you do, that it is a botch-work of half-philosophy and smatterings of 
knowledge. I know nothing in the world that more drew out and exercised 
a fine intellect. A botch-icork of smatterings and half-philosophy is that 
system of religion which people now want to set up in the place of the old 
one; and with far more invasion upon reason and philosophy than the old 
one ever pretended to. If Christ is not the true God, the Mohammedan 
r Ligion is indisputably far better than the Christian, and Mohammed himself 
was incomparably a greater and more honorable man than Jesus Christ; for 
he was more truth-telling, more circumspect in what he said, and more zeal- 
ous lor the honor of the one and only God, than Christ was, who, it" he did 
not exncily give himself out for God, yet at least said a hundred two-meaning 
things to lead simple people to think so; while Mohammed could never be 
charged with a single instance of double-dealing in this way." 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 49 

mighty to exorcise every evil spirit. The earthly miracles 
of our Lord were in some sense but anticipations and earnests 
of the moral miracles which that doctrine of the cross has 
wrought, is now working and will continue to work. Yet, 
— yet, does this Saviour open the blinded eyes of passion, 
and breathe strength wherewith to obey him into the palsied 
will of the sinner. . 

1. And first let us test the energy of the cross, in its ap- 
plication to the mechanical and utilitarian spirit of the age. 
It meets all the just wants of that spirit. Utilitarians demand 
the practical, and this is a doctrine eminently practical. 
Let us but observe this trait in Christ's own history. He 
might have theorized brilliantly and perhaps safely to him- 
self. He might have been the Plato or the Homer of his 
age, a Plato far more profound, a Homer far more sublime 
than the old Grecians. But he threw aside all such fame. 
He furnished the substance and subject of the most glorious 
literature the world has seen, but he left it for others to 
write that literature. His business was doing good. He 
was a practical teacher, and a practical philanthropist. And 
as to the actual working, and the every-day results of the 
doctrine since the Saviour's times, it is seen how Commerce 
confesses that her way has been often prepared and protected 
by the missionaries of this cross ; and how the statesman 
bears witness that his government has owed the stability, 
order and virtue of the community to the preaching of this 
cross ; and how the scholar attests that science has flourished 
best under the peaceful and sober influence of this religion 
of the cross. The gospel is eminently practical, then, and 
so far, it conciliates the spirit of utilitarianism. 

But the doctrine of the cross is not sordid and selfish, and, 
so far, it corrects the mechanical, utilitarian tendency of our 
times. Against the lust of gain, it sets, in strong contrast, 
the example of Christ's voluntary poverty, and in solemn 
warning, the Saviour's declaration how hardly the rich man 
enters the kingdom of heaven. Against the disposition 
which would set material interests above all others, and teach 
us to regard the tangible goods of earth as the only real or 
the only valuable possessions, the gospel shows Christ set- 
ting moral far above all material interests — and uttering the 
brief and pithy question, before which avarice turns pale, and 
ambition drops his unfinished task : " What shall it profit a 
man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or 

8 



50 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" If, as the 
great English moralist said, that which exalts the future, 
and disengages man's mind from being engrossed by the 
present, serves to elevate man to the true dignity of his 
nature ; how great the practical value of a faith, in whose 
far-reaching visions, time dwindles into a speck, and eternity 
becomes the paramount object of man's anxieties and hopes, 
where Truth is made more valuable than all things, to be 
bought at all risks, while Truth is not to be sold for the 
world. — And the prevalent selfishness which lies at the basis 
of that mechanical and utilitarian spirit of which we have 
spoken, is sorely rebuked by the very thought of a Divine 
Redeemer, who, moved by no selfish aims, but in disinterest- 
ed kindness, compassionately visits, and by the sacrifice 
of himself ransoms his envenomed foes ; and whose gospel 
makes all mankind my brethren in a common sin, doom, 
and ransom ; and bids me freely give to my fellow-man 
what I have most freely received. 

Imbue, then, your literature with that spirit, and men 
learn that they are not mere calculating, money-getting 
machines, that they have an immortal soul within them ; — 
and that the earth which they till and parcel out, and conquer 
and govern, is but the lodge of their few wayfaring years, 
as they are journeying to their home in the far eternity. 
Then the miser, as that world, revealed by the cross, heaves 
into view, unclutches his gold. Then the manoeuvres and 
tactics, the trickery and juggling of parties in the church 
and the state, show in their native meanness, beside the 
simple, sublime and unselfish scheme of the Redeemer. 
The views of eternity, gained at the foot of that cross, open 
a wider horizon to the noblest flights of science. The views 
of duty there learned, give a higher finish to all the details 
of industry and art. Give literature thoroughly to feel and 
diffuse this doctrine of the cross, and while, on the one 
hand, it is saved from fruitless speculations, and made em- 
inently practical ; it is, on the other hand, effectually snatch- 
ed from under the wheels of a mechanical age, and saved 
from being trodden into the mire beneath the hoofs of a sor- 
did selfishness. Thus the human mind, in its pursuit of let- 
ters, is made practical, but not mechanical ; and while taught 
to aim at the widest usefulness, is raised above a grovelling 
utilitarianism, that measures all good by selfish advantages, 
and the standard of present expediency. 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 51 

2. Bring again this doctrine to the trial, in its power 
over passion. We have remarked its effects on the tyranny 
of Mammon ; let us try its energies on the prowling spirit 
of Belial. In the death of the Mediator and Propitiation, it 
has provided for the free forgiveness of the most aggravated 
sins. To those who have become the slaves of their un- 
bridled passions, it holds out therefore the prospect of re- 
covery, and the promise of a pardon, full and immediate. 
It cheers those who had learned to despair of their own 
moral renovation. It announces hope for the world's out- 
casts. Those whom human society had shut out as irrecov- 
erable, and as sunk below the notice and sympathy of their 
fellows, it pursues and reclaims. In circumstances the most 
discouraging, and characters the most hopeless, it delights to 
work its miracles of mercy. It rears the flowers and fruits 
of virtue on the scarce cooled crust of the flowing lava of 
passion, that but lately had poured forth its devastating floods 
over every green thing. But while thus welcoming the vilest, 
it makes no peace with their evil passions. It exorcises 
the fiercer, to foster the gentler of these impulses and affec- 
tions of man's heart. Of this religion, the Lamb and the 
Dove are the chosen emblems ; meekness and kindness, the 
instruments of its triumphs ; and its law the law of love. 

Hence its signal power to humanize and civilize when 
introduced into those portions of society where it had before 
been unknown. See how it has tamed the rude, uplifted 
the degraded, and cleansed the polluted, and righted the 
oppressed in the islands and upon the continents to which 
the missionary has carried it. It has, indeed, much yet to 
accomplish even in the bounds of the Christian church. 
Bring it to bear more fully upon the habits and feelings of 
the church, and it will destroy there the supremacy of mere 
emotion and excitement, operating as they sometimes do to 
produce a false fire not from Heaven. It substitutes principle 
as the guide of life, instead of that treacherous and change- 
ful sympathy which is often made the rule of our way. It 
summons the disciple to view his Master's journey, Which 
kept ever its unfaltering gaze on the cross as its end, and 
looked steadily onward to the baptism of ignominy and 
agony that was to crown the long conflict ; and it bids him 
in emulation of his Master's example, to lead no random 
life, the mere sport of caprice and impulse. It rebukes 
those Christians who may be described as living by jerks, 



52 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

and whose fitful activity has all the contortions of the ad- 
ventitious life of galvanism. When allowed its full scope 
over the inner world of the heart, see its power to produce 
high and symmetrical excellence in Leighton and Doddridge 
and Baxter and Pearce, and, why should we hesitate to add, 
in the heavenly-minded St. Cyran and Fenelon ? See the 
men whom it has thoroughly possessed, in whom it operated, 
pervading all their passions, and making them to become 
like Brainerd or Martyn or Xavier, "living burnt sacrifices" 
on the altar of God. We see no lack of noble feelings and 
high emotion there. It is no painted flame that shines there ; 
much less are these the lurid fires of a malignant, persecu- 
ting zeal. The victim is consumed in the flames of a heav- 
en-descended charity, a holocaust to God, while all around is 
made radiant with the golden and lambent lustre of his love. 

For the doctrine of the cross is far from extirpating pas- 
sion. It but regulates it. No doctrine like it awakens and 
sustains the holier passions. All is purified and subordinated 
to the love of God, and man returns thus to the likeness of 
his unfallen self — to bear again some traces of his original 
character ere sin had marred his nature, or sorrow darkened 
his path ; and when all his powers and passions ministered to 
virtue and contributed to his happiness. 

Let literature then become but the handmaid of this doc- 
trine of the cross, and it can no longer pander, as it has too 
long done, to the fiercer or baser appetites of mankind. 
How much has the cultivated talent of the race, in its va- 
rious literary tasks, set itself to divide and destroy, to corrupt 
and intoxicate mankind ! Genius has shouted to swell the 
discord, and its cry has exasperated the strifes of the world, 
instead of being their peace-maker. How often has the 
scholar yoked himself to the brazen car of Moloch, or de- 
meaned himself to heighten the idolatrous revel in the groves 
of the wanton Ashtoreth ! How much of literary achieve- 
ment has perished in consequence of the corruption that so 
deeply engrained it, 16 or has continued and lived only to 

16 It is a remark of Sharon Turner, in his History of England during the 
Middle Ages (vol. iv., p. 143, note), how much of the Greek classical poetry 
was allowed to perish or destroyed by the Eastern Emperors, because of its 
immorality. And some of the authors whose productions have thus disap- 

E\ were, in the judgment of their countrymen and contemporaries, of 
i<;h genius. He names, among the writers whose remains thus perished 
wholly or in great part, Menander, Diphilus, Apollodorus, Philemon, Alexis, 
Sappao, Grinna, Anacreon, Miinnenuus, Bion 3 Alcman, and AIcujus. 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 53 

spread around moral infection ! Looking back over the 
history of our world, as preserved by those who knew not, 
or obeyed not this gospel, it is a humiliating record. The 
tumult and rage of passion seem endless. One wide and 
restless sea overspreads the scene. But when the gospel 
moves over this waste, dovelike in spirit, it comes like the 
dove to the ark of our diluvian father, bearing the message of 
peace and the omen of hope — the leaf that betokens the assuag- 
ing of the waters, the cessation of the storm, and the re-appear- 
ance of earth, from its long baptism of death, all radiant in 
new-born verdure and beauty. 

No skill in negotiation or prowess in war can avail like 
this gospel to establish peace among the nations. No police, 
however well-appointed and vigilant, has equal power to 
giv^e order and security to the nation or the city within itself. 
No principle or art, no degree of refinement and no measure 
of knowledge, can succeed like the religion of the cross in 
giving true peace to the household. To destroy, in all these 
relations of society, the tyranny of the vindictive passions, 
no power is like that of the gospel. Its efficacy to raise 
and restore the slaves of the baser appetites of our nature, 
we have already seen. A literature, then, controlled by 
this gospel, will not be the literature of mere blind passion. 
And no principle is so likely to eject from our literature this 
unreasoning vehemence of passion, as the great truth of Christ 
crucified, iterated and reiterated in the ears of our people. 

3. Apply it again, as a conservative principle, to counter- 
act the lawlessness of our times. If ever it appeared as if 
there might be a just revolt against the will of Providence, 
it seemed to be at the time when the meek Saviour, inno- 
cent, lowly and loving, was sold by the traitor, deserted of 
his disciples, assailed by the false accuser, and condemned by 
the unjust judge, whilst a race of malefactors and ingrates 
crowded around their Deliverer, howling for his blood, the 
blood of the Holy One. But though the cup was bitter, it was 
meekly drunk, for it had been the Father's will to mingle it, 
and his was the hand that held to the lips of the Son the 
deadly draught. Lawlessnesss is hushed at the sight of 
Gethsemane. In the garden and at the cross you see illus- 
trated the sanctity of law as it appears nowhere else. It 
was Mercy indeed that was forcing her way to the sinner ; 
but as she went, she was seen doing homage to Justice, and 
paying the debt, ere she freed the captive. That dread 



54 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

transaction proclaimed the truth that transgression could 
never in God's universe occur with impunity ; and that if one 
did not suffer, another must. Tenderness was there lavish- 
ed, such as the heart of man never conceived in its hour 
of most impassioned and concentrated affection. Yet that 
tenderness leaned on the sternest principle. The Father 
loved the Son thus sacrificed as his well-beloved one ; yet it 
"pleased the Father to bruise Him." Surely here is found 
no precedent for the lawless tenderness. that exonerates the 
criminal and blames the law. It is not at the cross of Christ 
that ministry has learned its lessons, which employs itself 
in weaving silken scabbards, in the vain hope to sheathe the 
lightnings of God's law ; or which is full of dainty contri- 
vances to muffle " the live, leaping thunders" of Sinai, and 
make them no longer a terror to the evil-doer. In the last 
scenes of the Saviour's life that law was not contemned, 
but " magnified and made honorable." So Christ would 
have it be ; and a true church of Christ would say : So 
let it be. What submission is here taught us to the ap- 
pointments of God — even though he slay us ! Where can 
self-denial, that rare and splendid grace of the Chris- 
tian, be so effectually acquired, as in watching the scene of 
his Master's passion, presented beneath the olives of Geth- 
semane, while the sod beneath is wet with great drops of 
bloody sweat, and the leaves above are stirred with the sobs 
of that ascending prayer, " not my will, Father, but thine 
be done." Subjection to the law of God is one of the best 
preparatives for submission to all the just laws of human 
society. " Paralytic laws," as Bentham expressively called 
those statutes of the Old World, which, from the expensive- 
ness of the courts and forms of justice, are inaccessible to 
the poor, are indeed a sore evil. But it may well be ques- 
tioned whether they are much worse than epileptic laws, as 
we may style those convulsive and spasmodic efforts at jus- 
tice, that are not unknown in the New World ; that sum- 
mary resolution of the legislative, the judiciary and the execu- 
tive branches of government into the sovereign will of the 
multitude ; the legislation which a mob in its hot haste 
enacts and executes in the same breath, compressing into 
one single act, all the various and dilatory tasks of the law- 
maker, advocate, judge, jury, jailor, and hangman. Send 
the spirit of Christ's cross through a land, and what a law- 
biding community would it become. The sanctity of law 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 55 

and right would then hedge around the property, character 
and interests of each member of society. It would make a 
latch sufficient protection for the vaults of a bank. Men's 
word would be their bond. Our schools and colleges would 
then be filled with youth, docile and modest, who would 
not begin their studies by undertaking to teach their instruc- 
tors, nor consider it their earliest duty to exercise a pater- 
nal authority and supervision over the Faculty of the In- 
stitution, whose instructors they deign to patronize by being 
there matriculated. Our sanctuaries would present the 
spectacle of Christians united in affection, bearing one an- 
other's burdens and so fulfilling the law of love. Far as 
the spirit of the gospel has already influenced literature, it 
has beer made a literature friendly to public order, and the 
ally of law, thinning where our popular literature too often 
serves but to multiply the tenants of our jails ; and teaching 
the disciples of the Crucified to render honor unto whom 
honor is due, and fear to whom fear. 

4. Look, next, at its power to check the false liberalism 
of the times, in its wretched effects on the moral integrity 
and purity of our literature. This form of evil has many 
shapes. All we cannot discuss. We would but enumerate 
its strange speculations as to Scripture ; its false liberality 
as to religious faith ; its false toleration in morals ; and lastly, 
its demon pride setting itself up to supersede Jehovah. All 
these how sternly does the cross of Christ rebuke and re- 
pudiate. 

Trust some of these liberal teachers, and all the old truths 
of Scripture vanish. Instead of its solid grounds of history, 
its significant prophecy, and all its varied, unerring inspira- 
tion ; they would usher us into a mere cloud-land of shifting 
speculations, unsubstantial and formless and evanescent. 
They would disembowel the Bible of its facts, and leave be- 
hind a few cold truths of Natural Religion, most awkwardly 
told, the fragments of a myth about the development of 
Human Nature. But take their theory to the cross. Look 
up at that sufferer. Read his discourses ; follow his miracles ; 
and believe, if you can, that this is not a history of facts. 
The confession of the infidel Rousseau bursts to your lips : 
" If this be a fiction, the inventor is yet more wondrous 
even than the hero of the narrative." You have the fullest 
circumstantial details of Christ's life, the country and age 
in which he lived, the cities he visited and the persons he 



56 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

met. The Sermon on the Mount is a fact, if you throw 
aside all the history in which it is found imbedded. Its ex- 
istence and its excellence are facts inexplicable rationally on 
any other theory than that of the truth and virtue and in- 
spiration of the Author. Pilate and Herod were facts. Je- 
rusalem was a fact. Gethsemane was a fact. Calvary was 
a fact. And he who hung there, on the fatal tree of anguish 
and shame, asserted not myths, but facts — wrought not 
myths, but facts — loved not in myth, but in fact ; and the 
salvation he has offered, the Heaven which he has opened, 
and the Hell from which he has warned us — all — all are 
facts. Wo to those who treat all as myths, until, not mythi- 
cally but really, they for ever forfeit the one, and plunge 
irrevocably into the other. To study the narrative of the 
gospels, apart from the prejudices of a preconceived system, 
and believe it a fiction, is impossible. Then were all history 
a fable. 

Try by the same test the spirit to which we refer, in its 
false liberality as to religious faith — its chameleon character, 
finding true piety in all creeds and worships, and identifying, 
as being but one God, Jehovah the God of the Scriptures 
with the Baal and Moloch whom he cursed, with Juggernaut, 
whose worshippers are crushed beneath chariot-wheels, and 
with Kalee even, when wearing her necklace of human 
skulls, and when invoked by the Thug, ere he strangles his 
victim. No, the Bible knows no such toleration and liberal- 
ity as this. It exclaims, "Israel hath forgotten his Maker, 
and buildeth temples." 17 A man may be, as a liberalist 
would term him, religious, and rear costly shrines from his 
devotional feeling, and yet God say of him that he had forgot- 
ten his Maker, and his religion was therefore valueless. 
The exclusive character of Truth, disdaining all compromise, 
was apparent in all Christ's course. He did not blend Sad- 
duceanism, Pharisaism, and Herodianism, and Heathenism, 
into one religion, a mere compost of creedless, Pantheistic 
piety ; and sanction all as meaning the same thing. On the 
contrary, he denounced all, provoked all, was assailed by all, 
and at last is seen dying by the confederated malice and hate 
of all. Truth was not, on his lips, a motley compound of all 
human opinions, an eclecticism from all varieties of human 

J 7 Hosea viii. 14. 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 57 

error, but, like its Divine Author, immutable and one, sanc- 
tioning no compromise and allowing no rival. 

Try these falsely liberal views, as to the toleration to be 
shown in questions of morals. Literature in our day pro- 
fesses to cultivate a sympathy for all classes, even for those 
who trade in vice, and eat the bread of wickedness. It has 
discovered that highwaymen, prostitutes and pickpockets 
have their literary rights, and should be fully represented in 
their own fashion in the great commonwealth of letters. A 
literature of felons is accordingly written, and alas, it is also 
read, corrupting our language with the slang of cut-throats, 
and our youth with their contagious immorality. Was this, 
now, the spirit of our crucified Lord ? He was indeed the 
friend of sinners. He sate in the publican's house as a 
guest ; he frowned not from his feet the weeping penitent, 
whose very presence seemed to others to shed contamination 
around her. But although thus forgiving to the sinner when 
contrite, he never dallied with sin itself. Paul seems to 
have found converts to the cross in the household of the 
atrocious Nero; but he never improves the advantages thus 
afforded him, to draw revolting pictures of the excesses of 
Nero's drunken hours ; nor has he recorded what to our 
modern novelists would have been invaluable, the confessions 
he might have heard from the criminals who were wafted 
with him over the Mediterranean, in the prison ship that 
bore him to Rome. There were things of which Paul says 
he thought it a shame even to speak. Well had it been for 
the purity of our literature and the innocence of our youth, 
had the writers of our age condescended to learn wisdom at 
the feet of Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles. Peter, another 
of the first preachers of the cross, speaks of sinners who 
had, " like the dog, turned to their own vomit again, and like 
the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire." 
But the apostle of the circumcision never stooped to picture 
the loathsome detail, and thus in effect to partake the ban- 
quet of the one, and share the bath of the other. Modern 
literature, aye, elegant literature, amid all the vaunted refine- 
ment of the nineteenth century, has done both, in order to 
enlarge our knowledge of nature and life, and to teach us 
superiority to the exclusiveness of vulgar prejudices. With 
such forms of liberalism the cross and its preachers have no 
sympathy. 

The cross repudiates the demon pride of this false liber- 
9 



58 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

alism. In Eden, Satan but ventured to promise " Ye shall be 
as Gods," hinting a distant likeness to God as the reward of 
sin. Modern Pantheism has renounced the qualifying terms, 
laid aside all hesitation, and converting the promise of future 
good into an assertion of present privilege, it exclaims au- 
daciously, "Ye are God." Hence, at the funeral, a few 
years since, of a great metaphysician of Germany, 18 one of 
the leaders of this philosophy, it is said that some of his 
admirers spoke of him reverently as a singular incarnation 
of God. But bring such dreams of pride to the atoning 
cross. He who hung there tasted death for every man. 
And why? We had all sinned : he died the just for the 
unjust ; and without the shedding of blood there is no re- 
mission. And there I learn my desert. In the fate of the 
second Adam I read the character of the first Adam, whose 
place he took, and whose doom he averted. I am a doomed 
sinner, by nature a child of wrath. The taint of an endless 
curse is on my soul. The blood of a divine atonement was 
necessary to purge me from fatal blots. Do they tell me of 
the innate innocence of man's nature ? I point them to 
virtue, perfect, peerless and divine, as it was incarnate in 
Christ Jesus. But that excellence was not welcomed in the 
world it came to redeem ; but on the contrary, it seemed to 
be the more fiercely hated, the more brightly it shone ; and 
it was revealed before the eyes of the race only to be ma- 
ligned, persecuted and slaughtered. At the cross of Christ 
I learn, then, that I must come down into the dust of lowly 
penitence, or I perish. His kingdom is for the poor in 
spirit ; and his most diligent followers are to confess them- 
selves but unprofitable servants. Is it in such scenes, and 
under the eyes of such a teacher, I am to claim equality and 
oneness with God? No ! such thoughts, every where ab- 
surdly impious, are there most offensively absurd and most 
unpardonably impious. And, as with a battle-axe, does the 
cross of Christ cleave and annihilate these arrogant fictions 
of that liberalism cherished by some who yet call themselves 
Christians. 

Yet, on the other hand, the gospel meets all those just 
claims of the soul, to which this liberalism has addressed its 
flatteries. The doctrine of the cross, with a true liberality, 
allows all national peculiarities not in themselves sinful. It 

is Hegel 



IN OUR LITERATURE, 59 

welcomes the savage and the slave into the brotherhood of 
the race, and is prepared in the most degraded and forlorn 
of all the tribes of the earth, to eject the brute, acknowledge 
the man, and develope the saint. It lays the basis of a true, 
universal, Catholic church ; — not the local, arrogant and 
usurping church of Rome, which, to make plausible its poor 
claim to universality, must anathematize the myriads of the 
Greek and Syrian churches, and all Protestant Christendom ; 
but that one church, real though invisible, which comprises 
the multitudes no man can number, and no man can name ; 
the Christians of every land, age and sect, that hold the 
Head, and love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. 19 The 
idea of unity, so dear to the liberalist, the cross alone truly 
reveals. It shows a unity of Providence in the whole history 

19 It was one of the grave offences in the excellent commentary of that 
devout Jansenist, Father Quesnel, on the New Testament, which brought 
down upon him and his work the fulminations of the Vatican in the famous 
Bull Unigenitus, that he had wrongly defined the Catholicity of the Church. 
Two of the one hundred and one heretical propositions selected from his Ex- 
position, the 72d and 76th, are these : " It is a mark of the Christian Church 
that it is Catholic, embracing both all the angels of heaven, and all the elect 
and righteous of the earth, and these of all times." And again, "Nothing i8 
more expansive than the Church of God, for all the elect and all the righteous 
of all times make it up." — (Magn. Bullarium Rom., Luxemb., 1727, torn. 
viii.) It can, we think, be shown that this true invisible Church, com- 
prising the truly righteous, the elect of all times, lands, and kindreds, is the 
only Catholic Church known to the Scriptures ; the only Catholic Church 
of which Christ will acknowledge the Headship ; or membership in which 
ensures salvation. Romanism could not, however, hold her power if such a 
theory of Catholicism were to prevail. The 72d Prop, is taken, apparently, 
from duesnel's remarks upon Heb. xii. 24 : as is the 76th from his Commen- 
tary at the 20-22d v. of Ephes. ii. His observations on the latter passage, by 
their beauty, tempt us to a longer quotation. " ' And are built upon the found- 
ation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief 
corner-stone ; in whom all the building, fitly framed together, groweth unto 
an holy temple in the Lord : in whom ye also are builded together for an 
habitation of God through the Spirit. 5 How majestic and how admirable, 
my God, is thy Church ! How worthy the work of its builder ! Nothing 
can be so august, for it is thy palace. Nothing so holy, for it is thy temple. 
Nothing inspire such reverence, for it is thine abode. Nothing is so ancient, 
for patriarchs and prophets have labored upon it. Nothing is so immovable, 
for Christ is its foundation. Nothing is more compact and indivisible, for 
He is its corner-stone. Nothing more lofty, for it lifts itself to the skies, and 
even into the very bosom of God. Nothing is better in its proportions, or better 
in arrangement, for the Holy Spirit is the architect here. Nothing is more 
beauteous or more variegated, for precious stones of all kinds are built into 
it, the Jew and the Gentile, those of all ages and countries, of either sex and 
of all conditions. Nothing is so expansive, for all the elect and all the right- 
eous of all ages make it up. Nothing is more inviolable, since it is a sanctu- 
ary consecrated to the Lord. Nothing is so divine, since it is a living struc- 
ture, in which the Holy Ghost has his dwelling, which He vivifies — which 
He sanctifies. There is but one God, one Christ, one Church. None is to 



60 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

of the world — a unity of piety in all dispensations from those 
days ere yet the ark was launched, to those of a new heaven 
and a new earth, when there shall be no more sea — a unity 
of origin, in the common descent of our race — a unity of 
transgression in our common sin — a unity of account in 
our gathering before Christ's bar, and a unity of brother- 
hood in our one ransom paid at Christ's cross. 

Let but our literature be saturated with this doctrine of 
the cross, and it will conquer all miscalled liberalism by 
showing the source of its errors and meeting its just claims. 
It will set up the truth, and require the renunciation of every 
error. But it will set up the truth in love ; and there will 
be ultimately one Lord, and his name One ; and He will 
not be the material and sinful God of Pantheism, but the 
Everlasting One, uncreated, impassible, spiritual, sinless and 
supreme, distinct from the universe he made and governs — 
the Creator, and not the creature. 

5. And lastly, would we say, the cross thus mighty to 
demolish liberalism, has also equal energy as the antagonist 
of superstition, which was spoken of as the last of the evil 
influences besetting our youthful literature. 

Instead of forms and rites, the great resource of supersti- 
tion, the gospel of the cross requires a spiritual worship, and 
an inward conversion. It has no regard for mere penances 
and austerities as practised for their own sake, or from a 
belief in their intrinsic merit. The doctrine of self-torture, 
so dear to the saints of Romish legends, is unknown to the 
gospel. Christ did not hew his own cross, nor was he his 
own scourger, as have been many saints that shine in the 
papal calendar. Instead of that antiquity of ten or twelve 
or fifteen centuries, of which Antichrist vaunts so much, 
the cross reveals a more ancient antiquity of eighteen cen- 
turies. Instead of its hazy and dubious traditions, scripture 
verity ; and instead of its councils and fathers, and a long 
succession of sinners wearing tiaras, and claiming names of 
blasphemy — a primitive Apostolic church, and Christ " for 



be adored besides the God whom we adore in three Persons. None wor- 
ships Him but as he loves Him, and none worships and loves Him as he 
should, but by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, and but in his body, which is the 
Church." Such views of Catholicism might well, for their spirituality, their 
wisdom, and their truth, be allowed to supplant and expel the arrogant and 
carnal dreams of a visible Catholic Church, that have been too prevalent 
even beyond the precincts of Home. 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 61 

the chief Apostle and Bishop of our profession," whose 
priesthood is the unchangeable priesthood of Melchisedec, 
and whose dominion is an everlasting dominion. It acknow- 
ledges no religion that is merely a religion of the senses or 
the imagination. The feelings that stirred Paul at Athens, 
as he stood amid its altars and gazed on lines of images 
crowding its every street, would have sprung up as naturally 
within him, had he stood beneath the vaults of many a cathe- 
dral, with its " dim religious light," and rich with the trophies 
of the pencil and the chisel. Against the idolatry of the 
material image of the cross and its sculptured burden, as 
seen in the Romish reverence of the crucifix — against the 
idolatry of the material emblems of bread and wine in the 
sacrament, as they are deified in the Romish doctrine of 
Transubstantiation — against the popular idol of all Romish 
countries, the earthly parent of our Saviour, the human and 
sinful mother, to whom they have transferred the media- 
torial office of her divine and sinless Son — against all these 
aspects of the worship of the creature, there is no better 
remedy than the faithful and full presentation of the true 
doctrine of Christ and Him crucified, the world's Creator, 
Redeemer and Lord. As Christ gave it, and as Paul dis- 
pensed it, the gospel of the cross is the grand Iconoclast 
principle of the age. And as of old it routed the gods from 
the summit of shadowy Olympus, and in later days drove 
into darkness all the deities of the Valhalla ; so will it ul- 
timately abolish all the idols out of the earth. And not 
the graven image only of wood and of stone, but the idols 
also of which Bacon has spoken, the idols of the forum 
and the cavern, the prejudices of the busy, and the errors of 
the studious. 20 

20 The writer has long believed, and elsewhere remarked years since, that 
in the inevitable conflict of the truth with Romanism in our days, we need 
to allow and to emulate more than some Protestants seem disposed to do, 
the excellences of individuals and of individual practices in that anti-Chris- 
tian communion : and that, especially in the field of missions we may learn 
from her history much to inspirit, and somewhat to instruct us. Since the 
delivery of this address he has met with the following observations from a 
writer on missions, whose work is probably in the hands of but few Ameri- 
can Christians. Though containing incidental expressions the present 
writer might not have preferred to employ himself, they seem so admirable 
on the whole, in sentiment, temper and style, that he could not deny himself 
the gratification of copying them. They are from the French of M. Bost. 
He is known to English Christians as the author of a history of Moravian- 
ism, published by the London Religious Tract Society, and of a life and 
collection of the letters of Felix JXefi; whose intimate friendship he enjoyed, 



62 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

To bring out the great truth to the cross, in one of its 
two-fold aspects, as the principle of sanctification no less 
than of justification, Protestantism may learn some not use- 
less lessons even from the Romish church. That abnega- 
tion of self, that deadness to the world, and those heroic 

and whose opposition to Romanism, we need not say he shares. He is an 
active and efficient laborer in the revival of evangelical truth in the churches 
of Switzerland. He published, in four volumes, a French version of the 
History of Christian Missions, written by the excellent Blumhardt, formerly 
head of the Mission School at Basle, which has sent so many laborers into 
most quarters of the earth. Blumhardt 1 s death left the work incomplete. In 
his own original preface to his French translation from the German, M. 
Bost has these observations on the justice to be rendered the Romish 
Church. We present them in a free and hasty version from his French 
original. 

" But here I reach a point yet more important than any that has preceded 
it. It is one upon which I am happy to find my sentiments in unison with 
those of my author :* as they will also prove to be, I think, with those of 
every man who has studied history in a spirit of impartiality. I refer to the 
two-fold judgment to which the facts of history conduct us, as to the good 
and the evil, the two sides that are found in the Romish Church, whether re- 
garded at any given moment in her existence, or at different eras in her 
career. I shall dwell, at some length, on this grave topic. 

" If all that were required, were but to discuss this subject in generalities 
and as an abstract question, the affair would be one of the utmost facility. 
History presents us in this Church, on the one hand, objects so grand and 
lovely, and on the other, those so atrocious, that it becomes impossible to 
persist, as regards this community, in that narrow judgment which sees in her 
only every thing divine, or only every thing devilish. On the contrary we 
find there to a demonstration a decided intermixture of God's work and of the 
work of Satan ; just as one may see a few paces from the spot where I am writ- 
ing, two streams that flow the one beside the other, in the same channel, the 
one all turbid and discolored — the other blue as the skies.t A little farther on 
they intermingle, but even yet they remain distinct- the good does not 
destroy the evil — the evil does not destroy the good. It would then be a 
matter of no difficulty to decide this question in the peaceful study, and amid 
the silence of our retirement. There it is perfectly simple, and admits of no 
dispute. The Romish church has exhibited in all ages, just as she con- 
tinues in our own times to exhibit, a decided alliance of evil and good : and 
of these, each perhaps is carried to a degree in which it surpasses what is to 
be found any where else. 

"But if we utter this judgment before the public, immediately passions 
are inflamed, interests are wounded, and we touch, so to speak, the raw 
flesh. In fact, the papacy, like a snake bruised beneath the wheels of a 
passing chariot, but that is not killed, is so far from dead, as to be rising 
again, and beginning anew to hiss and bare its fangs. Powerless as it will 
be before God, whenever God shall see fit to command it again into the pit, 
it is as yet more powerful than man, and seems, under more than one aspect, 
to resemble the strong man armed who is named in the Gospel. She is all 
the stronger and better armed, from the fact that to all the weapons of brute 
force, she knows how to unite those of artifice and restless intrigue, and even 
to associate with these, in many cases, the influence of profound piety. By 

* M. Blumhardt. > 

{ t The allusion is probably to the confluence of the Rhone and the Arve near Geneva. 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 63 

sacrifices, in which some of her confessors have excelled, 
have served to the staunchest Protestants as the incentives 
of a holy emulation. Leighton in one age, and Zinzendorf 
in another, were supposed to have enkindled their piety, 

turns, with clasped hands, with eyes raised to heaven, and clad in sackcloth, 
she is the ardent and high-minded missionary ; and next she is the courtier, 
climbing, flattering, and domineering ; attacking, by the arts of policy, no 
less than by the aids of religion, bearing down the devout by appeals to his 
conscience, and-holding out lures to the ambition of the diplomatist ; caress- 
ing now the anarchist, and now the despot ; the foe of republics, and yet the 
assassin of kings ; changing her hues like the chameleon, as you observe 
her at Dublin, at London, at Madrid, or at Paris ; winning over the sterner 
spirits by her Trappists, and the libertines by her Madonnas ; drawing you 
heavenward by her incense, her concerts and her sacred processions , and 
allowing you to slide into hell by her cheapened absolutions, and by pen- 
ances, that exempt you from the repentance of the heart ; founding schools 
in Italy, and overturning them in France ; by turns, O'Connell, La Mennais, 
Xavier, Vincent de Paul, Ravaiilac and Fenelon ; it is the same church 
who, in the middle ages, copied for us the sacred scriptures, and who, in our 
times, is burning them. At the present time, the blows which are aimed at 
her have been called forth, it must be allowed, rather by scepticism than by 
zeal for God. And although we may know what will be her last end, yet we 
know not its exact moment; and above all, we know not how much she 
may yet grasp, before she sinks. She is threatening England. She is 
infiltrating herself into all parts of the United States. She is rising anew in 
France ; and there she is met (and this is the observation we have been 
desirous thus to introduce), by a spirit of partizanship on the side of her 
adversaries, which, inclining them to treat her as enemies are usually treated, 
with blows, blows continually, and nothing but blows, does not stop to ask, 
if even she have not, in some points, claims upon our justice. 

" And yet, it is to Protestants that we speak, if we believe that on our side 
is found the truth, let us walk in the truth, as did the Master whom we claim 
to follow. Let us, in consequence, be just even towards the most unjust. 
Let us learn to guard ourselves against that absurd and heedless vanity 
which sees in its own ranks but splendid virtues, and in the opponents but 
faults and wrongs. Let us recollect that injustice never yet was able to 
found an enduring structure; — that the disciple of Jesus is teachable towards 
all, ever ready to learn, prompt in humbling himself, eager to find good 
wherever it is to be met, readily and with joy acknowledging it, and above 
all, having sufficient confidence in the sacred cause of Christ's Gospel, never 
to fear being generous to any party, be it what it may. Many see danger in 
the concessions that might possibly be made. But in what concessions l 
In those which should be unjust ? We ought never to make any such ; not 
because they would be concessions, but because they would be errors. In 
those which should be just? We ought to make all such, and to make them 
without fear. Without fear, did I say? — We ought to tremble lest we 
should leave a single one unmade — to tremble, lest we leave to our enemy a 
single point in which he would have the advantage over us; a single virtue 
in which he surpassed us. In truth, the kingdom of God is a combat of 
holiness against sin, much more than it is a conflict of opinions, of dogmas, 
or of hierarchies. Let this rule, then, without ceasing, be heard resounding 
over our heads : ' By their fruits shall ye know themJ And let us not say, or 
rather let us cease saying, as it often has been done, that this rule is a vague 
one ; for on whom does our censure in such case fall ? And who is He that 
gave us it, but the Only Wise, the friend of the lowly and simple in heart, who 
brings down questions the most profound and the most abstract, to princi- 



64 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

and formed in part their religious character, amid the Jan* 
senist Catholics of France, with whom each had mingled. 
Wesley, in his admiration of the character and graces of 
some of that communion, and in his endeavors to bring 



pies the most popular and practical, reducing them to questions of obedi- 
ence, of love, and of lowliness 7 

" Protestants then let us continue to be ; ,mt let us be humble. Protest- 
ants let us be ; but let us not proceed, from an apprehension of wronging the 
doctrine of divine grace, to fall into a dread of good works, or perhaps to 
regard as good works, and works quite sufficient, the style of doing good, 
as by turning a crank, adopted in certain societies, in which one does good 
with his neighbor's money, and in his ambition to convert the world, forgets 
too often his own proper and personal sanctification. Protestants let us be ; 
but let us know how to pardon others besides St. Paul, if they mortify their 
body, and keep it in subjection, through fear lest having preached to others, 
they become themselves castaways. Let us relinquish those vague and con- 
temptuous declamations against superstition, which better become the 
enemies of the gospel than disciples of the Saviour. And let us remember, 
that if it be wrong to build on a good foundation ' hay, wood and stubble,' 
we must yet, at the same time, know how to respect that laborer who, be- 
sides these worthless materials, brings gold and precious stones, and this, 
perhaps, in greater abundance than ourselves. Let us not fear to make the 
declaration. From that moment in which the Protestant Church shall have 
imitated, embraced and reverenced all that there is of excellence and super- 
iority in the Romish communion, from that moment the Romish com- 
munion must fall, and will in fact fall, because of the crying abuses con- 
tained within her ; but not one instant sooner. And until that time, she 
will, on the contrary, continue to exist, for the purpose of humbling us, for 
the purpose of holding us in check, for the purpose of counterpoising us in 
those points in which we refuse to obey, and for the purpose of accomplish- 
ing a sort of good which we have not learned to do. God compensates for 
one extreme by allowing another ; and it is not until the day when our prin- 
ciples shall no longer present any void and any vacant spot, that we can claim 
to look for the fall of a system which will then oppose to us nought but in- 
feriorities. Then the two communions, like two dark clouds, surcharged 
with opposite electricity, will approach each other to intermingle and become 
one : a spark from the higher regions will produce a sudden fusion, and a 
shower of grace pouring itself upon the earth, there will then start up in 
abundance new harvests, on the one side and on the other. 

* { But it is not the mere exactitude of doctrinal orthodoxy, that will be 
honored to bring about this wondrous result. It will be rather the sacred 
union formed between Truth and Holiness ; and our God will then be glo- 
rified, not amid some of his people only, but in all his saints. 

" Such are the declarations that I have believed myself bound to make in 
the outset, when publishing this work : there are, I believe, some readers 
that will need them. We shall, along our way, and this long before the six- 
teenth century, find many Protestants, it is true: but yet we shall see, too, 
that God glorified himself also in men who were imbued with many preju- 
dices; and the reader must have little Christian feeling, who is not touched 
with admiration, and softened into tenderness, at the sight of a multitude of 
things that present themselves to our view, even in those ages when super- 
stition had already invaded the church. 

11 Finally, when all this shall have been said and admitted, it is yet most 
true, and history proves it to demonstration, that in proportion as Rome 
more and more intermingled herself in the government of the church, in 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 65 

the light of their example before his own societies, by his 
publication of the lives of Xavier, De Renti, and Gregory 
Lopez, incurred from some heedless Protestants of his age, 
the imputation of covert Romanism. He complains thai 
he had thus been represented by one of our own Sten- 
netts, as but a disguised Papist. David Brainerd, too, in 
the earlier years of his heroic mission, found himself fol- 
lowed by a like rumor, that he was but a concealed Roman- 
ist. We do well to remember in our conflict with error, 
that a prevalent worldliness is, in God's eyes, as great a 
practical heresy as is the tenet of justification by works. 
And a worldly orthodoxy in Protestantism will never avail 
to subdue a devout superstition in Romanism, because it is 
not in the nature of Beelzebub to cast out Beelzebub, as our 
Saviour has told us. 

In the collision, not only impending but already begun, at 
so many points of the foreign missionary field, between the 
Church of Rome and the Churches of a purer faith, God is 
making a merciful provision to strip the Churches of the 
Reformation of their remaining worldliness and errors, to 
crush in them all self-dependence and all vain-glorying, and, 
shutting them up to a simpler faith and a more heroic ardor, 
to nail them more closely, as by a blessed necessity, to his 
own cross as their one refuge and exemplar. Rome may, 
from the very amount of superstition she brings with her, 
find her missionary labors in the lands of Pagan superstition 
more rapidly crowned with success, than those of her rivals, 
in the adhesion of nominal proselytes to her standard. But 
her victories will be less solid and enduring than the slower 
conquests of Protestantism. Where resorting, as she has 
so often done, to worldly intrigue, and calling to her aid 
the arm of the secular power, she will often find her advan- 
tages but short-lived, from the original sin that gave their 
first seeming prosperity. The Sandwich Islander, for in- 

that same proportion also did the Spirit of God withdraw from it. The 
safety and the life of every church whatsoever are found in obedience to the 
laws of Christ. 

" I would no further anticipate the details contained in the body of this 
work ; but I found myself compelled to defend, as in advance, those views, 
and as I may emphatically call it that comprehensiveness of principle, which 
it has seemed to me are demanded alike by Christian truth, by Christian 
wisdom, and by Christian humility." — A. Bost. 

Histoire de l'etablissement du Christianisme, 

Geneva, 1838. t. I. Preface du Traducteur, pp. viii— xiii 

10 



68 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

stance, is not likely soon to forget that the missionary of the' 
chair of St. Peter came to his islands with the cannon of 
Catholic France forming the van-guard, whilst the crucifix 
and the brandy-flask filled, as it were, the two hands of the 
intrusive missionary church. 

As to the ultimate influence this ambitious and versatile 
church is to win on our own shores, the statesman may well 
have his doubts. Never let Protestantism, even in resisting 
Rome, be driven to adopt measures of proscription and 
persecution. If for the time, here and in other lands, Rome 
may attempt a union with the free tendencies of the age, 
and seek to identify herself with the cause of Social Pro- 
gress, it yet seems but little likely that she will be able to 
maintain a very firm and lasting alliance with our " fierce 
democracy." That democracy is bent upon change and 
impatient of control, whilst this church proclaims change in- 
compatible with truth, and demands control as necessary to 
unity. M. de Tocqueville has supposed that the love of our 
people for unity will naturally, and most powerfully, com- 
mend to them the church holding out so wide-spread and 
magnificent an exhibition of it. But, on the other hand, 
there is, as yet, rife amongst us a passion for independence, 
and our institutions generally foster a free and early de- 
velopment of individual character, which will work in a con- 
trary direction. And Rome, again, whatever she may claim 
to be abroad, is essentially a secular power at her own 
proper home. By her own hearth she is an autocrat, the 
most absolute. In her forms of government there, in her 
European alliances, and in well nigh all the recollections of 
her history, she is essentially a petrifaction of despotism. 
It will, therefore, be difficult, even for her ingenuity, to weld 
together the old tyrannies of the East and the new liberties 
of the West. Still, it is not in such considerations that we 
trust 

The Christian, looking higher than the mere statesman, 
relies for his country's freedom, as well as for the purity 
of his country's faith, on the cross of Christ. The provi- 
dence of God has abolished here all religious establishments, 
and proclaimed unlimited toleration. Puritanism fled hither 
for a refuge. The hierarchies of the old world would gladly 
find here a new and rich domain. God has thus, apparently, 
intended to make our land an arena for the unfettered con- 
flict of the crucifix and the cross — an open field for the con- 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 67 

test between the idolatrous materialism and the divine spiri- 
tualism of the doctrine of Christ crucified. If the American 
Churches are but true to the gospel, they need not fear. If 
they are not true to it, God will find another people who 
will be. Its ultimate and universal triumphs are sure as the 
flight of time. We read in the unerring volume of scripture, 
not the history of the past alone, but that of the future as 
well. Prophecy had uttered, and sealed up to the times of 
the end, the doom of Romanism, centuries before our birth, 
even when it was yet but as a hidden leaven, working, in 
concealment and darkness, its stealthy way to the hearts of 
the nations. And while the sceptre of the universe shall 
continue, as continue it will, to lie in the hand that was 
pierced for us and nailed to the tree of Golgotha — while 
Christ reigns, Antichrist cannot. Here are our auguries for 
our country, our age, and our race. 

Bring up all forms of error, and we say, however numer- 
ous and however venomous the viperous brood, the heads 
of all are yet to be crushed against the cross of Calvary. 
Produce all the spiritual diseases, aggravated, various and 
loathsome, that have made earth one huge lazar-house, and 
we lay our hand upon the cross and say, here is the catholi- 
con, the sure and sufficient remedy for all the countless 
maladies of the soul. Receive, love, diffuse and exemplify 
that doctrine ; and every error is subverted, and every truth 
is ultimately established. 

" Ye are the salt of the earth," said the founder of Chris- 
tianity to his disciples. They were the conservators of the 
world's knowledge, virtue, freedom and peace. In the 
Church was to be found the quickening and recuperative 
energy, that was to stay each moral plague of society, and 
preserve its masses from a universal corruption, which 
would else allow them to settle down into an utter and 
putrid deliquescence of the social elements. The followers 
of Christ were thus conservative, not from their talents but 
from their principles, not by their personal endowments or 
worldly rank, so much as by their relations to the gospel 
and God, sending up their intercessions to Heaven, and 
holding up the light of their example and their testimony 
before man, advocates with one world and patterns to an- 
other. Their faith was then the principle of their spiritual 
vitality, and that faith centered in the atoning and availing 
sacrifice of the cross, as its sole trust and its highest model. 



08 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

In our examination, therefore, of literature and its depen- 
dence upon the cross, we have been but appropriating to a 
narrower field, what our Saviour said of the wide circuit of 
the world. We say of its literature what He said in the 
broadest sense of all its interests. And if any should deem 
our claims of the literary power of the gospel unwarrant- 
ed or exaggerated, their accusation, it will be seen, rebounds 
from us as a reproach on the wisdom of Him who " spake 
as never man spake." 

We might glance at the effects upon the interests of 
literature, of the resurrection of the true doctrine of the 
cross at the era of the Reformation. We might look to the 
splendid and varied literary results of the revival of this doc- 
trine among the Jansenists of France, when the literature 
of the nation, in logic and in style, in sobriety and manly 
vigor of thought, as well as in purity of moral and religious 
character, was so rapidly advanced by the devout Port Roy- 
alists 21 — when Tillemont produced the erudite, candid and 
accurate history that received the praises of Gibbon, when 
Nicole wrote so beautifully on Christian morals, Le Maistre 
stood at the head of the French bar, De Saci furnished to the 
nation what remains yet their best version of the Bible, 22 

21 " It would not be too much to assert, that this mass of men of high 
intellect, and filled with noble objects, who, in their mutual intercourse, and 
by their original and unassisted efforts, gave rise to a new tone of expression 
and a new method of communicating ideas, had a most remarkable influ- 
ence on the whole form and character of the literature of France, and hence 
of Europe ; and that the literary splendor of the age of Louis XIV. may be 
in part ascribed to the society of Port Royal." 

Ranke's History of the Popes. Thilad. 1841. Vol. ii. p. 208. 

22 An English scholar, James Stephen, Esq., the nephew, we believe, of 
Wilberforce, in a brilliant article upon the Port Royalists, contributed to the 
Edinburgh Review in the year 1841, has pronounced this glowing eulogy on 
the version of De Saci. " In those hours De Saci executed, and his friend 
transcribed, that translation of the Holy Scriptures, which to this moment 
is regarded in France as the most perfect version in their own or in any 
other modern tongue. While yet under the charge of St. Cyran, the study 
of the divine oracles was the ceaseless task of De Saci. In mature life, it 
had been his continual delight ; in the absence of every other solace, it pos- 
sessed his mind with all the energy of a master passion. Of the ten thou- 
sand chords which there blend together in harmony, there was not one 
which did not awaken a responsive note in the heart of the aged prisoner. 
In a critical knowledge of the sacred text, he may have had many superiors, 
but not in that exquisite sensibility to the grandeur, the pathos, the super- 
human wisdom, and the awful purity of the divine original, without which 
none can truly apprehend, of accurately render into another idiom, the sense 
of the inspired writers. * * * Protestants may with justice except to many 
a passage of De Saei'e translation ; but they will, we fear, search their own 
libraries in vain for any, where the author's unhesitating assurance of t\w 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 09 

Lancelot aided by his grammars the progress of classical 
science, Pascal in so many walks displayed such rare and 
varied excellence, while Arnauld thundered as the doughtiest 
theologian of the schools — when Racine, the pupil of the 
community, became the most finished of French poets, 
Boileau, their friend, the most perfect and most pure of 
French satirists, and Madame de Sevigne, their admirer, the 
most graceful and simple of French letter-writers. 

The cross of Christ thoroughly appreciated and ardently 
loved is an adequate remedy for all the evils of the world, 
and necessarily, therefore, for all the evils of the world's 
literature. It contains the only elements which can coun- 
teract all the perils we have described, satisfy the demands 
of the human heart, and correct the wanderings of the hu- 
man reason, and thus remedy the evils, be they literary or 
political, of society, by supplying those wants of our nature 
out of which these evils have sprung, and by restraining the 
excesses to which these wants lead. As to the casuistry 
and superstition, the fanaticism and persecution, that have 
sometimes abused the name of the cross for their shelter, we 
can only say that the doctrine is no more chargeable with 
these its perversions, than is the dread Name of God re- 
sponsible for all the fearful profanation made of it, when it is 
used as an oath to give sting to a jest, or to add venom to a 
curse. 

But some feel, and others have intimated that the cross of 

real sense of controverted words permits his style to flow with a similar 
absence of constraint, and an equal warmth and glow of diction." A calmer 
critic, and one more versed in the text and versions of the scriptures, Dr. J. 
Pye Smith, unites in awarding eminent merit to the translation of De Saci. 
In his Four Discourses on the Sacrifice and Priesthood of Christ, (Lond. 
1828,) he remarks upon the advantage of studying a difficult passage with 
the consultation of various translators. " Eve» translations which may, as 
a whole, be inferior, will often exhibit instances of successful expression, in 
single words and clauses, most remarkably bringing out the beauty and 
genuine force of the original. Among the modern versions I beg leave to 
point out the extraordinary excellence, particularly in the New Testament, 
both as to fidelity of sentiment, and felicity of expression, which distinguishes 
the French translation of Isaac le Maistre de Sacy, one of the illustrious 
society of Port Royal, and a noble sufferer for truth and conscience." (pp. 
273, 274.) The chief defects of the work grew out of its being founded on 
the Vulgate, and its being frequently ra-ther a beautiful paraphrase, than a 
literal version. It is, like the Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan, the Letters of 
the Marian Martyrs in England, the letters of the excellent Samuel Ruther- 
ford of Scotland, the Latin Psalms of Buchanan, and some of the religious 
works of Grotius, a part of the prison literature of the church, having em- 
ployed its venerable author during his incarceration, as a confessor for the 
truth, under the dominant influence of Jesuitism at the French court. 



70 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

Christ has been tried, and has failed. The church has tried 
substitutes for it indeed, and these have ever failed. But 
the cross itself has not yet been tried by the church contin- 
uously and fully. Protestantism even has talked too much 
of it as justifying the sinner, but shrunk from it as sancti- 
fying him. As to its failures, when really tried, they have 
never been more than apparent. In the hurry and cry of 
the conflict, the voice of evil is louder than that of good. 
When most seeming to fail, the cross is but like its Founder, 
when amid the growing darkness of his last agony, the 
Dragon seemed writhed around him, and the fatal sting of 
death was transfixing him. For a time the race of mankind 
might seem to have lost their Redeemer, and the gates of 
Hope, as they swung slowly back, appeared about to close 
for ever upon a sinking world. But when that darkness 
was past, and the field of battle was again seen, it was the 
'Dragon that lay outstretched and stiffened, with bruised 
head — all feeble and still, in the shadow of that silent cross ; 
while radiant in the distance were the open portals of 
heaven, and earth Jay bathed in the lustrous dawn of a new 
Hope, 

" For the gates of Paradise 
Open stand on Calvary."* 

And when some forty days have passed, there is seen in 
the glittering air over the summit of Olivet, the form of the 
unharmed and ascending Redeemer. As victor over death 
and hell, he is leading captivity captive, returning to his 
proper and native glory, and going before to prepare a royal 
mansion and a crown of righteousness for all his cross-bear- 
ing followers. Thus was seeming failure the secret and the 
forerunner of real victory. So has it since been. The days 
of the French revolution, when infidelity was ready to tri- 
umph, ushered in the era of foreign missions, when Satan's 
oldest seats underwent a new invasion. So will it continue 
to be. Every conflict, sore and long though it may be, will 
but add to the trophies of the Redeemer's cross, till around 
it cluster, as votive offerings, the wreaths of every science 
and the palms of every art — and that instrument of shame 
and anguish be hailed as the hinge of the world's history 
and destiny, the theme of all our study, and the central sun 
of all our hopes, the sanction to the universe of all God's 



Montgomery. 






IN OUR LITERATURE. 71 

laws, and the seal to all the elect of our race of an endless 
redemption from the belief, power, and practice of all evil. 
In the coming years of the world's history, the presaging eye 
may look forward to the fierce clash of opinions, the tumult 
of parties, and the collision of empires. But when the 
waters are out, and one barrier after another is overwhelmed, 
and one sea-mark topples and disappears after another 
beneath the engulfing flood, God is but overturning what man 
has built. The foundation of his own hand will remain un- 
shaken. The floods of the people cannot submerge it ; the 
gates of hell cannot prevail against its quiet might. 

We feel that we need your forgiveness for the length to 
which we have pursued this topic. But the subject, in its 
earlier portion at least, was a complex one ; on the latter 
portion of it, if any where, the Christian loves to linger ; and 
dwelling as we had been compelled to do on the gloomier 
side of the picture, we may now be pardoned, if the eye 
loves to rest on that light from heaven, and those radiant and 
celestial omens, that descend upon this darkness from the 
cross of our Lord. 

And now, in conclusion, will you allow, gentlemen, the 
stranger, as he is to most of you, who addresses you, to ap- 
peal to you as students ? Your studies have taught you 
how the best interests of the nation are bound up with those 
of learning ; and we have endeavored at this time to revive 
a lesson your respected and beloved instructors have often 
enforced, that the interests of learning are bound up with 
those of the gospel, and that there only is found a knowledge 
which to have learned, will form the best preparation for 
rightly improving all other knowledge ; — which not to have 
learned, will render all other learning finally nugatory to its 
possessor. 

Amid the various and multiform evils that threaten our 
literature, the cross of Christ is the one conservative prin- 
ciple, and it needs but to be fully presented, to prove ever 
the sufficient remedy. We entreat you then, for yourselves, 
to view habitually this cross in either of its aspects, as re- 
vealing the way of the sinner's justification, and as showing 
the process of the believer's sanctification. 

Look to it as your salvation. You need to be transformed 
by its holy influences. There learn the love of God as 
poetry cannot paint it — the wisdom of God as philosophy 
in her boldest flights never surmised it — the holiness of God, 



''73 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

as not even Sinai proclaimed it. Receive this crucified 
Christ as your Saviour. Say, as you raise your eyes to this 
throne of suffering mercy, in the language of that old 
monkish verse from the Dies Irae, which Johnson, stern as 
was his rugged nature, could never repeat without bursting 
into a flood of tears — 

" Q,ueerens me sedisti lassus, 
Redemisti crucem passus ; 
Tantus labor non sit cassus ! 23 

Again, many or most of you look to be preachers of this 
gospel. Be the cross your theme, Christ, as there lifted 
up, will draw all men unto him. Do not yield blindly to 
the rage for novelty. There are those who cannot be satis- 
tied with any thing as old as the gospel, and as unchange- 
able as Christ. Like the Israelites, they loathe even manna, 
when made their daily bread. Remember, this appetite 
for change is not to be cured by indulging it, and is itself a 
symptom of moral disease. With all skill used in varying 
the mode of its presentation, still let your theme be one ; 
and shrink not from the censures of those who demand some- 
thing newer than the truth, and better than Jesus Christ, 
*■* the same yesterday, to-day and forever." And the more 
the school or the press may eject this doctrine, but the more 
let. the pulpit insist upon, reiterate, and thunder it forth, in 
all the tongues of the earth. For it is to you a surer pledge 
of success than that imaged cross which Constantine put 
into the labarum of the empire, was of victory to the im- 
perial hosts whom it so often guided to conquest. Do not 
crucify that Lord " afresh" by your sins. Nor trust to your 
office and work as preserving you from these. See in Paul, 
the distress an apostle felt, lest having preached to others 
he himself should prove a cast-away. The anxieties of 
such a hero and martyr, lest he should turn and perish, may 
well arouse you to a salutary self-distrust. The pulsations 

23 ** Wearily for me thou soughtest, 

On the cross my soul thou boughtest, 
Lose not all for which thou wroughtest." 
It is to Mrs. Piozzi that we owe this anecdote of Johnson. " When he 
would try to repeat the celebrated Prosa JEcclesiastica pro Mortuis. as it is 
called, beginning Dies Irai, dies ilia, he could never pass the stanza ending 
thus, Tantus labor non sit cassus, without bursting into a flood of tears; 
which sensibility I used to quote against him when he would inveigh 
against devotional poetry, and protest that all religious verses were cold and 
feeble, and unworthy the subject." — Crokcr's Boswcll, London } 1839, vol. 
ix. p. 73.— (See Appendix , Dies Ira.) 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 73 

of that mighty heart, in its strong apprehensions, are even 
now to be felt, as after the lapse of centuries, it seems yet 
to throb and heave under the pages of the epistles. Value 
not any professional learning apart from an experimental 
knowledge of the cross of Christ. Remember that the man 
mighty in prayer, and full of the Holy Ghost, and who knows, 
as a preacher, but the scriptures in his own vernacular 
tongue, may take his place, as a theologian 24 and a pastor, 

24 We may well ponder the language upon this subject of a scholar who 
is not liable to the imputation of enthusiasm, ignorance, or partiality. 
Speaking of the Bereans who searched the Scriptures, Bishop Horsley, in his 
Nine Sermons on the Resurrection, <$*c. (New York, 1816, pp. 165, 166), takes 
occasion to remark upon the knowledge that may be gained from the mere 
English version, by a collation, diligent and prayerful, of its parallel passages. 
"It is incredible to any one who has not in some degree made the experi- 
ment, what a proficiency may be made in that knowledge, which maketh 
wise unto salvation, by studying the Scriptures in this manner, without any 
other commentary or exposition than what the different parts of the sacred 
volume mutually furnish for each other. I will not scruple to assert that 
the most illiterate Christian, if he can but read his English Bible, and will 
take the pains to read it in this manner, will not only attain all that practi- 
cal knowledge which is necessary to his salvation, but by God's blessing, he 
will become learned in every thing relating to his religion in such degree, 
that he will not be liable to be misled, either by the refined arguments, or 
the false assertions of those who endeavor to ingraft their own opinion upon 
the oracles of God. He may safely be ignorant of all philosophy except what 
is to be learned from the sacred books ; which indeed contain the highest 
philosophy adapted to the lowest apprehensions. He may safely remain ig- 
norant of all history, except so much of the history of the first ages of the 
Jewish and of the Christian church, as is to be gathered from the canonical 
books of the Old and New Testament. Let him study these in the manner 
I recommend, and let him never cease to pray for the illumination of that 
Spirit by which these books were dictated, and the whole compass of ab- 
struse philosophy and recondite history shall furnish no argument with 
which the perverse will of man shall be able to shake this learned Christian's 
faith." 

The testimony as to the amount of theologicial science to be attained from 
the study of the English version, has the more force, coming as it does from 
a controversialist of the highest rank, a scholar of great robustness of intel- 
lect, and eminent for his attainments not only in biblical criticism, but also 
in physical science ; and who was known, withal, to have few sympathies 
with the Methodists and the Dissenters of England, and their pious but 
often uneducated ministry. The editor of the works of Sir Isaac Newton, 
the chaplain of Bishop Lowth, and the antagonist of Priestly, was no vulgar 
scholar. Orme has said of him, that he " never wrote what did not deserve 
to be read," and characterizes him as "stern, bold, clear, and brilliant, often 
elegant, sometimes argumentative, and always original, and as a critic, 
learned but dogmatic." (Bibliotheca Biblica, p. 249.) Such a man was 
little likely to indulge in language of undue disparagement as to those literary 
advantages in which he himself so abounded. We allude here to his testi- 
mony, only for the sake of enforcing a protest we would, here and elsewhere, 
now and at all times, make against the language of depreciation, sometimes 
incautiously used, regarding the competency as theologians of some of our 
ministers who have missed the advantages of a classical education} but who 

11 



74 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

far above you with all your knowledge of criticism and lan- 
guages, if you rely on that learning and neglect to cultivate 
piety. The true exegesis of the Scriptures is, after all, that 
put upon them by the Holy Spirit who first indited them, as He 
unfolds them to the prayerful student, and he who puts him- 
self, with few earthly helps, under that teaching, will profit 
more than the man who with all earthly helps neglects that 
teaching. Steep then all your attainments in prayer. And 
never so far forget your obligations to true learning, and 
your vows to Christ, as to speak or think lightly of the de- 
vout, though less learned student of the Scriptures, who 
bears meekly, and commends earnestly that cross it is your 
business and his, in common, to exemplify and extol in the 
eyes of the world. 

Lastly, let that cross be your pattern. Let Christ and 
him crucified, be not a mere phrase or profession, but a 
living reality. That sacrifice on the cross was the embodi- 
ment of all true glory, and the concentration of all moral 
excellence. Be prepared to suffer in the school of Christ. 
"If we suffer, we shall also reign with him." Such is the 
law of success in the world of mind and of eternity. Learn 
the mute energy of meekness daring to suffer, persisting to 
love, and scorning to complain, as illustrated in Christ dy- 
ing for his murderers, and proffering to the world a recon- 
ciliation bought by his own blood for those who had shed 
that blood ; and extending to his embittered foes pardon 
which their sins alone had made necessary, and which his 
unparalleled compassion alone made possible. Remember 
that your rest, and your reward and your record, are not 
here, as His were not here. It was not that you might 
seek a snug parish and a fat salary, that the Master en- 
listed you — not that you might gather round you the flat- 
teries, and become the idol of an attached church and an 
admiring congregation. You were bought by the agonies 
and shame of Calvary for a sterner task. You are not 
carpet-knights, come out to shiver a lance in sport ; the 
actors in some gay tournament, where " ladies' eyes rain 
influence." Your work is a sad reality in a world of sin 

are yet vigorous thinkers, and prayerful and most diligent students of the 
English version. We must record our humble dissent from such sweeping 
censure and depreciation, and while the name and memory of Andrew Fuller 
remain, we scarce need to quote even the authority of Horsley in our favor, 
who with all his stores of learning and his vigorous genius, was certainly 
not a sounder or abler theologian than the Kettering pastor. 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 75 

and wo, where you are called to a continuous and perilous T 
onset, fighting against principalities and powers, and spirit- 
ual wickedness in high places ; and the field around you 
is strewn with many a memorial of defeated hope, of suc- 
cessful temptation, and exulting wickedness. You will not 
then content yourself with a mere decorous, dozing and 
perfunctory discharge of your weekly task-work in the pul- 
pit. You are a man of the cross — it will be your aim to 
train up the churches to the same standard and in the same 
spirit. They will learn that the charity of the cross is one 
seeking rather to enrich others, than to hoard for itself. 
When the churches are more thoroughly pervaded by this 
spirit, there will be no longer a lack of funds or of labors 
for our foreign missions ; nor will the nations rush by myri- 
ads into hell, whilst the church is grudgingly telling out 
her few dollars for the work of evangelization, and calcu- 
lating how much money may be saved from the expense of 
the world's salvation, not economizing for the cross, so 
much as economizing from its demands. 25 You will remind 

25 The resources of the later Christian Church for the general diffusion of 
their faith may possibly resemble, in character, those of the earlier church. 
In a work, from the preface of which we have already quoted in a former 
note, the History of Missions by Blumhardt in its French version by M. 
Bost, we find M. Blumhardt making these observations on the missionary 
character and success of the early Christians. He is reviewing, at the close 
of the fourth century, the fall of Heathenism and the triumph of Christianity 
in the Roman empire, and the influences that produced these results. (Livre 
II. C. V. Vol. i., pp. 203-215). Having observed (p. 205), "that the Church 
is in its very nature an institution designed to form men into Christians, and 
not merely to gather together those who have already become such," and 
having remarked upon the various powers that aided, modified, and cor- 
rupted the Christian Church in its action on Roman Paganism, he holds 
this language as to the arms that the primitive Christians employed in the 
victories they won (p. 209). "We may perceive, amid this train of events, 
the law of perpetuation which was pursued by the messengers of salva- 
tion. All their preaching they grouped around the one figure of Christ as 
the Sovereign, Saviour and Judge of the human race, and this doctrine, 
again, they evermore based upon the Scriptures, to which they continually 
referred, not as to a human system, to which other systems might in turn 
be opposed, but as to a direct revelation from God. This course supplied to 
the Church, at once, the basis, the standard, and the unity that it needed, 
and also, at the same time, what was its most powerful means of conversion 
and of diffusion. The great cause of the success of the gospel was to be 
found in its very nature. A faith, that taught men their reconciliation with 
God, brought into the world a principle of life, which nothing else could 
rival, and for which nought else could compensate. This it is which gave 
to the Christians, at the very outset, the courage, and we may well call it, 
the audacity, with which they always facecl their adversaries. One might 
tremble for a Tertullian, had we not known the strength on which he 
leaned. * * The Christians had on their side an irresistible might, not in 



76 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 

the churches that they were enlisted beneath the gory cross, 
the badge of the Master's anguish and shame, that, as far 
as man is concerned, they might rather give than receive ; — ■ 
that no vulgar pangs bought their peace ; and it was no 
easy task for their Lord to purchase for them their hope 
of Heaven. If impelled and permitted yourselves to go 
forth to the heathen, you will look to Golgotha, and find 
there motives whose impulsive power is never spent, and an 
example, whose self-sacrificing benevolence can never be 
rivalled. It is one of the traditions of the age of chivalry, 
that a Scottish king, when dying, bequeathed his heart to 
the most trusted and beloved of his nobles to be carried to 
Palestine. Enclosing the precious deposit in a golden case, 
and suspending it from his neck, the knight went out with 
his companions. He found himself, when on his way to 
Syria, hard pressed in battle by the Moors of Spain. To 

the form of reasonings so much as of facts. l That which we have seen and 
heard, and our hands have handled, of the word of life, declare we unto you. 1 
And as these sacred truths from the beginning had been preserved in au- 
thentic writings, the Christians devoted themselves to the dissemination of 
these their sacred books, and to the translation of these books into various 
languages, with a zeal that had no parallel : and this form of proselytism was 
to be found nowhere else than in Christianity." * * * * Having ad- 
verted to the secondary causes, as found in the existing condition of society, 
that favored the spread of the gospel, he proceeds (p. 211) to the remark. 
" But it was above all the love that was diffused among the believers, that 
must strike and win the hearts of the pagans, in this era of selfishness and 
of cruelty. In this respect, the Church presented a spectacle such as 
Paganism had never beheld; and on this topic, indeed, nothing stronger 
could be said, than was afterwards said by Julian himself, as in one of his 
edicts he addressed his Pagan subjects : ' Is there not reason for us to be 
ashamed as we look upon others ? The Jews allow not one of their number 
to sink into beggary ; and the accursed Galileans support not only their own 
adherents, but even those of our party also? We alone are unable to point 
to any institution of a kind resembling theirs.' 

" Such, then, were the powerful arms of which the faith availed itself in 
this memorable epoch in its history. There existed no missionary societies 
properly so called ; it was the entire Church of Christ Jesus that took upon 
itself the task of proclaiming the gospel. Nor did there exist missionary 
treasuries, or any. provision of that kind, whether it were that missionaries 
then had little or no use for money, or whether it were that each member of 
the church, rich or poor, finding his own happiness in the aid he lent to 
this work, found also with ease the requisite means. All the institutions of 
this kind that have been seen growing up in our times, as the fruits of a 
growing zeal, have their place only as the day has not yet come, when each 
member of the Church shall have again become for himself a zealous servant 
of the SaViour." We append to these remarks of Blumhardt the note 
annexed to the concluding sentences above quoted, by M. Bost. "It is 
worthy of* remark, that all this was written by the presiding officer of one 
of our best missionary institutions, for the entire paragraphias been trans- 
lated with almost literal exactness." 



IN OUR LITERATURE. 77 

animate himself to supernatural efforts as it were, that he 
might break through his thronging foes, he snatched the 
charge entrusted to him from his neck, and flinging it into 
the midst of his enemies, exclaimed, " Forth, heart of Bruce, 
as thou wast wont, and Douglas will follow thee or die :" 
and so he perished in the endeavor to reclaim it from the 
trampling feet of the infidels, and force his own way out. 
Even such will you feel your own position to be when en- 
countering the hosts of heathenism. Your Master's heart 
has flung itself in advance of your steps. In the rushing 
crowds that withstand you, there is not one whom that heart 
has not cared for and pitied, however hostile and debased, 
unlovely and vile. It is your business to follow the leadings 
of His heart, to pluck it, as it were, from beneath the feet 
of those who, in ignorance and enmity, would tread it into 
the dust. From the cross, as from a lofty eminence, it has 
cast itself abroad among these " armies of the aliens." And 
not like Douglas, is it yours to follow it and die ; you fol- 
low it and live. You follow it, and the heathen live. And 
whether your post be at home or abroad, among the des- 
titution of the West, or that of the ancient East, whenever 
glory, ease or wealth may seek to lure you aside from your 
work, look to that cross, and remember him who hung there 
in agony for your sins. Let the look which broke Peter's 
heart check your first infirmity of purpose, recall each wan- 
dering thought and rally anew all the powers of your faint- 
ing spirit. Be Paul's determination yours. " God forbid 
that i should glory save in the cross of our lord 
Jesus Christ, by which 26 the world is crucified 
unto me, and i unto the world." 

May we all believe in, and bear that cross here, that it 
may bear us up in the day of the world's doom ! 

26 « Whereby." Versions of Tyndale, Cranmer, and Geneva i and not 
" by whom" as the Rhemish and the English Received Version. 



APPENDIX. 



THE "DIES IR^." 

(Seepage 72.) 

A small volume, not without interest, might be compiled from the literary 
history of the Dies Irae, and the versions it has received into various Euro- 
pean languages, and from examples of the powerful influence it has exercised 
upon the feelings and course of individuals. It can scarce be regarded as a 
waste of time to observe and analyze the power this hymn, from the awful- 
ness of its theme, and its own quaint, antique, and massive grandeur of 
structure, has acquired over the hearts of men. Unlike the Stabat Mater, 
another hymn of the Romish service, with which by mere critics it is ordi- 
narily classed, it is free from idolatry. A devout Protestant cannot unite in 
the Stabat Mater. It degrades the Redeemer by idolizing his earthly pa- 
rent. But in the Dies Iras, salvation is represented as being of Christ alone, 
and as being of mere grace : " Qui salvandos salvas gratis." Combining 
somewhat of the rhythm of classical Latin, with the rhymes of the Mediaeval 
Latin, treating of a theme full of awful sublimity, and grouping together the 
most startling imagery of scripture, as to the last judgment, and throwing 
this into yet stronger relief by the barbaric simplicity of the style in which it 
is set, and adding to all these its full and trumpet-like cadences, and uniting 
with the impassioned feelings of the South whence it emanated, the gravity 
of the North whose severer style it adopted, it is well fitted to arouse the 
hearer. It forms a part of the Romish service for the dead. Albert Knapp, 
one of the living sacred poets of Protestant Germany, and the compiler of a 
large body of hymns, the Liederschatz, has inserted a German version of it 
in his voluminous collection. (Evang. Liederschatz. Stuttgart, 1837. Vol. 
ii. p. 786, Hymn 3475.) He compares the original to a blast from the trump 
of the resurrection, and while himself attempting a version of it, declares its 
original power inimitable in any translation. (Ibid. p. 870.) This is the 
judgment of a man not to be contemned as a critic or a translator, for 
Knapp himself is called by a recent German critic, who seems far removed 
from any sympathy with the religious school to which Knapp belongs, " un- 
questionably the most distinguished religious poet of the day." (jT/iimm's 
Literature of Germany, Lond. 1844 ; p. 260.) Knapp refers to other versions of 
it made by the distinguished scholar, Aug. Wm. Schlegel, by Claus Harms, 
one of the most eminent of the living evangelical preachers of Germany, as 
well as by J. G. Fichte, by A. L. Follen, J. G. Von Meyer, and the Cheva- 
lier Bunsen, the friend of Niebuhr and of the late Dr. Arnold, and now the 
Ambassador of Prussia at the Court of St. James. The translation of 
Bunsen, with some slight variations, is appended by Tholuck to his sermon 
on the Feast day of the Dead. (Tholuck, Predigten. Hamburg, 1838, vol. I. 
pp. 28, 149.) Professors Edwards and Park, in their Selections from German, 
Literature (Andovcr, 1839), quote the remark of Tholuck, as to the deep sen- 
sation produced by the singing of this hymn in the University church at 
Halle : M The impression, especially that which was made by the last words, 



APPENDIX. 79 

as sung by the University choir alone, will be forgotten by no one." They 
introduce also the words of an American clergyman, present on the occa- 
sion, who says, "It was impossible to refrain from tears, when at the seventh 
stanza, all the trumpets ceased, and the choir, accompanied by a softened 
tone of the organ, sung those touching lines, " Quid sum miser tunc dictu- 
rus" &c. Like Knapp, they unite in the judgment, that no translation has 
equalled, or can equal the original Latin. (German Selections, p. 185.) Dr. H. 
A. Daniel, another German scholar, in his Bliithenstrauss alt-latein, Kir- 
chenpoesie, Halle, 1840, has inserted, besides the original Latin, and the Ger- 
man version of Bunsen (pp. 78 and 116), another version of his own (p. 110). 
Goethe has introduced snatches of the original Latin into the first part of his 
Faust. 

The larger work of Daniel on the Mediaeval Hymns, his "Thesaurus Hym- 
nologicus," has not come into our hands. Dr. G. A. Konigsfeld, in his Latei- 
ni-sche Hymncn und Gesdnge aus dem Mittelalter, Bonn, 1847," has given (pp. 
155 and 264) his German imitation of this hymn, with some interesting notes 
upon its variations and history. Together with Lisco, hereafter named, he 
refers to an earlier Essay by G. C. P. Mohnike, in his Kirchen. u. lit. hist. 
Studien, \r Band, \s Heft, Stralsund, 1814, as having very thoroughly dis- 
cussed the origin and literary fortunes of this remarkable composition. This 
Essay we have failed to find. 

With the thoroughness that distinguishes the scholars of his nation, a liv- 
ing Protestant theologian, Dr. Frederick G. Lisco, preacher at the church 
of St. Gertrude, in Berlin, already advantageously known to British and 
American Christians, from his work on the Parables of our Lord, translated 
and issued in the Edinburgh Biblical Cabinet, and author of a popular com- 
mentary on the New Testament, has prepared and issued an edition of the 
Dies Irae (Berlin, 1840), containing seventy translations, fragmentary or com- 
plete, of this magnificent hymn, mostly into German, with notes of much 
interest and research. To a similar work on the Stabat Mater (Berlin, 1843), 
Lisco subjoined seventeen additional versions of the Judgment Hymn. One 
of these is a translation of it into modern Greek, by the Rev. Mr. Hildner, 
a Missionary of the (English) Church Missionary Society at Syra, and was 
sent by its author to the Litt. Anzeiger of the distinguished Prof. Tholuck. 
As double rhymes in Greek may be a curiosity to some readers, we subjoin 
tne verse already quoted, in the modern Greek garb given it by Mr. Hildner. 

'JUarOVV (fc) KSKOTT L01O /AMOS 
Ko7TOJ jif] fiaTCLl(i)IJL£VOS 1 

Hildner' s remark is that, dear as the Hymn had always been to him, it had 
ever borne a higher place in his regard after having heard it sung in the cele- 
brated Sixtine Chapel at Rome. Lisco' s Stabat Mater did not reach the 
hands of the present writer until after the first edition of this address, nor did 
he succeed in procuring the sight of his Dies Irce until after the second edi- 
tion had been issued. 

Though some have claimed the honor of the authorship for the eminent 
Bernard, and others given to it an earlier and pontifical parentage in assign- 
ing it to Gregory the Great, Lisco and Mohnike and Gieseler refer it to Thomas 
de Celano. Lisco' s main reliance in this seems, that it is explicitly and with- 
out hesitation ascribed to him by Wadding, in his two works on the His- 
tory and the Writers of the Minorite Order, (Annates Minorum, Laigd. 1625, 
and Scriptores Ord. Minorum, Romce, 1650.) These German scholars seem 
fond of remarking that although Celano was of Italian birth, his native place 
being the town of that name in the Neapolitan territory, some of his life was 
spent in the service of his order, on the banks of their own Rhine, at Co- 
logne, and elsewhere. 

Lisco refers to one German, Lecke, who wrote and published twelve sev- 
eral versions of the Dies Irae. 



80 APPENDIX. 

The authorship of the hymn is generally ascribed to one of the Franciscan 
order, or the Minorites as they are also called. Thomas de Celano, the friend 
and biographer of Francis of Assisi, the founder of this order, and who lived 
in the thirteenth century, is generally supposed to have written it about the 
year 1250. (Gieseler's Ch. Hist. 1st Am. Ed. II. 288. Knapp, Liederschatz II. 
870. Thohick and Daniel ut supra.) Celano, it may be observed by the way, 
is one of those on whose authority is made to rest the legend that Francis 
received the stigmata or miraculous impressions of Christ's wounds. (Alban 
Butler, Ldves of Saints.) It has also been attributed to others of the same 
order, as to Matthew of Aquasparta, a general of the Minorites, who died with 
the rank of Cardinal, in 1302, or to Frangipani, the Dominican, who died in 
1294. (Knapp, Lisco, ut supra.) Churton, the author of the " Early English 
Church," would give it, however, a much earlier origin, or he has fallen into 
a gross anachronism ; for he places it in the lips of the dying Thurstan, the 
Archbishop of York, who ended his course in the year il40, a full century 
before the time generally fixed for its composition by T. de Celano. (Chur- 
ton, Am. Ed. p. 272.) 

Issuing, as it certainly did, from an age of great superstition and corrup- 
tion, it is remarkable that it should be so little incrusted with the prevalent 
errors of the time. The lines " Quern patronum rogaturus Cum vix Justus 
sit securus ? 3i seem almost a renunciation of the Romish doctrine of the ad- 
vocacy of saints. Like the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, it 
remains as a monument of the truth, that in ages of general declension, God 
had his own hidden ones, and that beneath the drifting and accumulating 
mass of heresies and human inventions and traditions, there was an under- 
current of simple faith in Christ, that kept alive and verdant some less 
noticed portions of the blighted vineyard of the church. If really the work 
of the historian of the stigmata of the fanatical Francis of Assisi, it affords 
another of the many examples that show how much excellence and how 
much error may exist together. 

The Franciscan order, in its earlier history, would seem to have cultivated 
sacred poetry. Francis, its founder, was the writer of some Italian verses, 
" two in the earliest poetical flights in the language," (Eustace. Classical 
Tour, II. 148) ; to Thomas de Celano, the authorship of the Dies Irae is 
generally attributed ; and to another Franciscan, Jacopone, is ascribed by 
the chief authorities the composition of the Stabat Mater. 

The received Text of the Judgment Hymn, as incorporated into the Church 
Service in the Romish Missal, is not supposed to be by any means its origi- 
nal shape. The revisions of devotional poetry, which have in our own times 
awakened loud complaint, as if they were modern and audacious examples 
of a temerity unknown to our fathers, were practised in earlier times ; and, 
in some cases, retrenchment was improvement. The earliest forms of the 
Dies Irae are thought to be that in which it is found inscribed upon a mar- 
ble slab in the Church of St. Francis, at Mantua, and that in which it is 
given by Felix Malleolus (Hammerlein). In the Mantuan text, it has the 
aspect, by its introduction, of a devotional and solitary meditation, rather 
than of an anthem for the use of an assembly ; beginning with the following 
verses, the entire excision of which, by the Romish Missal, leaves in the fifth 
verse (thus made the first) an opening peal of startling majesty. 

1. Cogita, anima fidelis, 
Ad quid respondcre velis 

Christo venturo de ccelis. m 

2. Cum deposcet rationem, 
Ob boni omissionem, 
Ob mall commissionem. 

3. Dies ilia, dies ine, 

Q,uam conemur praevenire, 
Obviamque deo irae. 



APPENDIX. 81 

4. Seria contritione, 
Gratias apprehensione, 
Vitae emendatione. 

Then follow the first sixteen verses of the present received Text ; but, in- 
stead of the 17th of this, " Oro supplex" &c, comes as the conclusion of the 
Mantuan text, being, (with the four introductory verses above given,) the 
21st verse, 

Consors ut beatitatis 

Vivam cum justiflcatis, 

In aevum asternitatis. Amen. 

The text of Hammerlein has the .first sixteen verses as we find them in the 
Breviary, with some verbal variations ; and then follow eight verses, more reg- 
ular in structure than the close as found in the Received Text, and contain- 
ing (which the latter does not) an idolatrous reference to the Virgin Mary, 
as herself, instead of her Son, being the Root and Offspring of David. The 
close, as found in the popular and ecclesiastical shape of the Hymn, seems 
an irregular and fragmentary condensation of these verses — the more forcible 
from its greater brevity, and, to a Protestant, welcome by its unaccountable 
omission of the Mariolatry. 

17. Oro supplex a ruinis 

Cor contritum quasi cinis; 
Gere curam mei finis. 

18. Lacrymosa die ilia, 
Cum resurget ex favilla 
Tanquam ignis ex scintilla, 

19. Judicandus homo reus, — 
Huic ergo parce Deus, 

Esto semper (tunc ?) adjutor meus. 

20. duando coeli sunt movendi, 
Dies adsunt tunc tremendi, 
Nullum tempus poenitendi. 

21. Sed salvatis laeta dies ; 
Et damnatis nulla quies, 
Sed daemonum effigies. 

22. O tu Deus majestatis, 
Alme candor Trinitatis, 
Nunc conjunge cum beatis. 

23. Vitam meam fac felicem, 
Propter tuam genetricem, 
Jesse florem et radicem. 

24. Praesta nobis tunc levamen, 
Dulce nostrum fac certamen, 
Ut clamemus omnes. Amen. 

Although the exact relation of these texts to each other is a matter of ' 
doubt, it seems the more probable that the Received Text is the truncated 
remnant, left after a double revision ; the first excision having removed the 
introductory stanzas, as found on the marble in the church of St. Francis, 
and, when this retrenched text was elongated by additional verses at the 
close, as in the text of Hammerlein, a second revision greatly condensed 
these ; and each excision benefited the Hymn. 

A French scholar, ia an article contributed to the Rcvuq des deux Mondcs, 

12 



83 APPENDIX. 

Paris, since the appearance of Lisco's work, but in which wc do not re-' 
member any reference to the work oi the German scholar, has traced what 

he supposes intimations and germs oi the Dies lra\ both as to its phrase- 
ology and its metre, in the Latin hymns of the Romish church, in the cen- 
turies preceding its composition. He has also entered at much length, and 
it would seem with much delicacy and justness of criticism, into the char* 
acter oi the music that some of the most distinguished composers of Italy 
and Germany have prepared for the Dies Inc. 

Upon the Dies lra\ Mozart has founded his celebrated Requiem, the latest 
and not the least celebrated of his works. The excitement of his feelings 
whilst employed on this musical composition, is supposed to have hastened 
his end, which occurred, indeed, before he could fully complete the task. 
Among the great names who have sought to marry its poetry to immortal 
melody, may be enumerated Cherubini, Haydn, Jomelli, Palastrina, and 
Pergolesi. 

Of tlie various versions the Hymn lias received into the French language, 
We are unable to speak. Lisco {D. I. 116) alludes to one by Gonon, a CYI- 
estine monk, in the beginning oi the 17th century, and (in his App. to the 
St. M. -\S) gives another oi the date oi 1702, apparently from a Catholic 
prayer book. A Jesuit oi France, whose work we have seen, issued, some- 
where about the time oi the first great Revolution of that country, in a vol- 
ume oi Latin poetry, an expansion of the Judgment Hymn, in oilier metre, 
and in Latin oi more classical style, in each change betraying, it would 
seem to us. a want of discrimination and taste. 

Among the poets of England the Dies lne has found hosts of admirers, 
and many translators. The admiration which Sir Walter Scott felt for it is 
well known. He has introduced an English version of a few oi its opening 
stanzas into the Lay oi the Last Minstrel, whence Bishop Heber adopted 
it into his Hymns for the Church Service. They are too few to give any 
just idea oi the original, and the measure of the old Hymn is not as well re- 
tained as in the best German versions. Knapp, Daniel ami Bunsen all pre- 
serve the double rhymes of the Latin original; Scott and the earlier Eng- 
lish translators have given but a single rhymed ending to their verses, fn 
this respect the English version of the London Christian Observer (Vol. 
xxvi. p. '26), copied by Edwards and Park (German Selections, p. 15), also 
comes short oi its model, as Joes that oi the Rev. Isaac Williams, one of 
the writers oi the Oxford Tracts, and who contested unsuccessfully with 
the Rev. 3lr. Garbett, the election to the Professorship of Poetry in Oxford, 
on the retirement oi Keble. Williams 1 version may be found in his Thoughts 
in Pus! \ ears {Am. erf., /'. 308). The school of Oxford Tractarian Theology, 
to which this writer belonged, seem to have been, from their admiration of 
the Mediaeval Church, as well as from its own intrinsic merits, strongly at- 
tracted to the Judgment Hymn. One oi their number, Rev. E. Caswafl, who 
has gone over to Rome, has in his Lyra Catholiea (London, 1849), a version 
of the Hymns oi the Breviary, given an English rendering (p. 241), that may 
\ ie. for Closeness and felicity, with that of Trench, named hereafter. Another 
Writer, of the same type ill doctrine with the Oxford Tractarian, the Rev. 
W. J. Irons, has published [Dies Ji\c, by \V. J. Irons, London, S. Masters, 
1849) a version, with music, described as retaining the metre and double 
rhyme oi the original. This last work we have failed to meet 

A writer in tin 1 New- York Evangelist (October, 1841), has judiciously re- 
tained the double rhyme, but the reader misses the antique simplicity and 
rugged Btrength of the original. Sir Walter Scott in his letter to a brother 
poi t, Crabbe, n marks i "To my Gothic car. the Ste Mater, the Dies Irce, 
and BOme oi the other hymns of the Catholic chinch, are more solemn and 
afiecting than the fme classical poetry oi Buchanan; the one has the gloomy 
dignity oi a Gothic church, and reminds us constantly of the worship to 
w mob it is dedicated ; the other is more like a pagan temple recalling to our 
memory the classical and fabulous deities.' 1 (Locknari's Lijc of Scott) Phil" 






APPENDIX. 83 

t 
arJdpftla, 1838, vol. i., p. 430.) In his last, days of life and mason, ho was 
overheard quoting it with fragments of the Bible, and the old Scotch Psalms. 

" Wo very often,' says his kinsman and his biographer, "heard distinctly tho 
cadence of the Dies Ira*." (/bid., vol. ii., p. 734.) Its lines haunted in liko 
manner the dying hours of an earlier and Inferior poet, the Earl of Roscom- 
mon. He was the author of an English version of the hymn, and, as wo 
learn from Johnson's Lives of tin; Poets, he Uttered, in the moment when 
he expired, with great energy arid devotion, two lines of his own translation 
Of the Dies Iraj : 

"My God, my Father and my Friend, 
Do not forsake me in my end." 

Another nobleman, on the Continent, Count von Hcrnstofi; a native of 
Denmark, who died in Berlin, in the year 1835, is mentioned by Lisco (D. /., 
j>. 139), as having produced his German rendering of the Judgment Hymn, 
upon his death bed. Milman, another distinguished name in English po- 
etry, has, in his History of Christianity, rated this hymn as superior to any 
of the poetry of the Christian church in the early ages. " As to tin; hymns 
(setting aside the Te Deum), paradoxical as it may sound, I cannot but think 
the latter and more barbarous the best. There is nothing, in my judgment, 
to be compared with the monkish " Dies Jraj, dies i//a," or even the fctabat 
Mater. (Milmarii (idlii^nanVs Ed. JJ., ]>. 330, note). Roscommon's trans- 
lation, already the subject of reference, is said by Warton to be largely in- 
debted to the earlier version of Crashaw, a sacred poet of true genius, whoso 
rendering Of the Dies Jrcu was, in the judgment of Pope, the best of his com- 
positions. ( WillmoLfs Lives of Sacred Poets, Load. 1839, vol. i., p. 317.) This 
work of Crashaw may be found in Andersons British, Potts (vol. iv., p. 745). 
Crashaw was one of the clergymen of the English church, who during, or soon 
after the days of Laud, and probably from the influence of that school whoso 
leader and martyr Laud was, went over, as by a. natural progression, into 
the Romish communion. Drummond of llawthornden has also imitated 
the Dies free. (Anderson, iv. 682.) Evelyn, the author of the Sylva, and 
the friend of Jeremy Taylor, seems also to have tested his strength upon tho 
same task. In their correspondence; Taylor asks a copy of his friend's ver- 
sion. (Memoirs of Evelyn, Vol.. 1 V. p. 26.) 

An English version of tin; Hymn has been given, amongst our own schol- 
ars, by the Rev. J. Newton Brown (Baptist Memorial, New York, October, 
1848), now one of the .Secretaries of the Baptist Publication Society in Phil- 
adelphia; and another rendering of the Hymn, the most successful of tho 
English versions in double rhyme, appeared in the Newark Daily Adverti- 
ser of March 17, 1847. In that Journal, as in the New York Observer, it 
was awarded generous and just commendation, as is understood, by a distin- 
guished pastor and professor, whose praise is true honor. Although appearing 
anonymously, the version in the Newark Daily Advertiser was by Abraham 
Coles, M.D., of Newark, N. J., whose friends may well congratulate him on 
having achieved so successfully a difficult task, in which so many, and of 
eminent name, have been his competitors. 

That accomplished Christian nobleman, Lord Lyndsay, in his Work on 
Christian Art (Lond., 1847, vol. I., pp. ccvii., ceviii.), has contributed another 
to the long list of attempts to transfer this Hymn into our own tongue. His 
version has but the single rhyme. He remarks, upon the tone of its piety, 
" as expressive of the feelings of dread, and almost despair, with which the 
Christians of the middle ages — taught to look on Christ as Jehovah, rather 
than the merciful Mediator, through whose atoning blood and all-sufficient 
merits the sinner is reconciled to his Maker — looked forward to the awful 
consummation of all things." We cannot but dissent, in some measure, 
from this judgment. Our Lord's own picture of the judgment, in the Gos- 
pel of Matthew, is equally stern and terrific i and the Hymn does not, as 



84 APPENDIX. 

much as most offices of the Romish Church, overlook the grace of Christ 
as the sinner's only plea. 

I In allusion probably to its antique massiveness and majesty, Lisco quotes 
the title given by some to the Dies Irae, " a Hymn of Giants," (p. 87.) 
Considering the character, however, which the Anakim of Holy Writ, and 
the Titans of classic mythology, have borne for piety, the appellation seems 
infelicitously chosen. That name might, it appears to us, be more fitly 
given to the parodies of this great hymn, in which sacred themes, and the 
celestial imagery of Revelation, have been plundered by human passion, for 
the purposes of passing controversy and political satire. To parodies, in 
his own tongue, of this class, by Ed. Duller, J. H. Voss, and E. Ortlepp, 
Lisco refers, (D. /., p. 139 ; St. M., p. 55.) From his work it appears, 
also, that the example of putting to such baser uses holy things had been 
long before set by the clergy of the Roman Church. He quotes (I). /., pp. 
110, &c.) from the German writings of Leibnitz, a Latin parody given by 
that, great scholar, as the work of some Catholic priest about the year 1700. 
This zealous parodist, from the union of the French and Spanish crowns in 
the Bourbon family, hoped for the downfall of the Protestant Holland, the 
conversion of England, and, in consequence, the subversion of Lutheranism 
and Calvinism throughout Europe. 
Of Spain's future victories in the fens of the Netherlands, he sings : 

Quantus tremor est futurus, 
Dum Philippics est venturus, 
Has paludes aggressurus i 
***** 
Hie Rex ergo cum sedebit, 
Vera fides refulgebit, 
Nil Calvino remanebit. 

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus, 
Quern Patronum rogaturus, 
Cum nee Anglus sit securus ? 

The great monarch of France he thus apostrophizes, in allusion to the 
lilies on his armorial shield. 

Magne Rector liliorum. 
Amor, timor populorum, 
Parce terris Batavorum. 
* * * 

To the anticipated defeat of the " bald-headed " William of Orange, the 
political hope of the Protestant interest in Europe, and to the restoration of 
James II., the abdicated king, and of his son the Pretender, that, in their 
recovered British dominions, they might plant a triumphant Romanism, he 
thus dedicates his two closing stanzas. 

Confutatis Caloi brutis, 
Patre, nato, restitutio, 
Redde mihi spem salutis ! 

Oro supplex et acclinis 
Calvinismus fiat cinis, 
Lacrymarum ut sit finis ! 

The attempt thus to hurl the thunderbolts of Providence, and to predict 
the glories in reserve for the Catholic Church, proved a wretched failure. 
Never in the century since, has the cause of Rome been, in contrast with 
that of the Reformation, possessed of as muck even of comparative strength, 
as when the parodist prophesied : far less has she increased in resources and 
influence to the extent his auguries promised ; and the Stuart dynasty, in-, 
stead of the promised restoration, has met its extinction. 



APPENDIX. 85 

The want of any devout feeling that pervades this parody, whose author 
certainly wanted not either talent or ingenuity, in singing the future tri- 
umphs of his church, is most painfully apparent, in his profane distortion of 
the 14th stanza, to the adulation of Louis XIV. 

Preces meae non sunt dignae, 
Sed, Rex magne, fac benigne, 
Ne bomborum cremer igne. 

Little did the " Grande Monarque," or his flatterers suspect, that his own 
victories and glories, and those of his family after him, were sowing for their 
country, and for Europe, the seeds of that stormy retribution, the great French 
Revolution, in which neither Catholic France, nor Catholic Spain, nor Cath- 
olic Italy escaped so well as did the Holland and England whose degrada- 
tion and ruin they had plotted and promised. 

But to return from these reckless perversions, a Hymn, such as the Dies Irae, 
which has wrought so strongly on the graver temperament of the North, 
was not, although Gothic in its structure, likely to remain without any effect 
on the quicker feelings of the South. Ancina, at that time a professor of 
medicine in the University of Turin, was one day hearing mass, when the 
Dies Irae, as chanted in the service for the dead, so strongly affected him, that 
he determined to abandon the world. He afterwards became Bishop of 
Saluzzo ; (Biogr. Diet, of Soc. Diff. Use/. KnowL, "Ancina;"). and in that 
episcopal charge, St. Francis de Sales declared of him, that he had never 
known one of more apostolic character. (Lives of the Companions of St. 
Philip Neri, London, 1849, p. 8.) 

A composition that has, with no effort at elaboration or poetic art, so long 
attracted the admiration of poets like Goethe and Scott, distinguished for 
their skill in the mere art ; and yet met also the wants and won the sympa- 
thies of men, who, disregarding poetry, looked mainly to piety of sentiment — 
a poem that has thus united the suffrages of religion and taste, deserves 
some study, as a model, in that walk of such difficulty and dignity, the walk 
of sacred poetry. 

The Latin original though made accessible to American readers in Ed- 
wards and Park's German selections, p. 185; in the Encyclopaedia Amer- 
icana, (art. Dies Irce) ; and in Isaac Williams' Thoughts in Past Years, (Am. 
Ed. p. 309,) may be here given, for the benefit of some who may not have at 
hand either of those works. 

I. 

Dies irae ! dies ilia ! 
Solvet saeclum in favilla ; 
Teste David cum Sibylla. 

n. 

Quantus tremor est futurus, 
Q,uando Judex est venturus, 
Cuncta stricte discussurus, 

in. 
Tuba mirum spargens sonum, 
Per sepulchra regionum, 
Coget omnes ante thronum. 



Mors stupebit et Natura, 
Cum resurget creatura, 
Judicanti responsura. 



APPENDIX. 



Liber scriptus proferetur, 
In quo totum continetur, 
Unde mundus judicetur. 



Judex ergo cum sedebit, 
Quidquid latet apparebit, 
Nil inultum remanebit. 

VII. 

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus? 
Quern patronum rogaturus, 
Cum vix Justus sit securusl 

VIII. 

Rex tremendae majestatis ! 
Qui salvandos salvas gratis, 
Salva me, fons pietatis. 

IX. 

Recordare, Jesu pie, 
Quod sum causa tuae viae : 
Ne me perdas ilia die. 



Quaerens me sedisti lassus ; 
Redemisti crucem passus ; 
Tantus labor non sit cassus. 

XI. 

Juste Judex ultionis, 
Donum fac remissionis 
Ante diem rationis. 

XII. 

Ingemisco tanquam reus ; 
Culpa rubet vultus meus ; 
Supplicanti parce, Deus. 

XIII. 

Qui Mariam absolvisti, 
Et latronem exaudisti, 
Mini quoque spem dedisti. 

XIV. 

Preces meae non sunt dignaa 
Sed tu bonus fac benigne, 
Ne perenni cremer igne. 



Inter oves locum praesta, 
Et ab haedis me sequestra, 
Statuens in parte dextra. 



Confutatis mnledictis, 
Flannnis acribus addictis 
Vocu me cum bcnedictis. 



APPENDIX. 87 

XVII. 

Oro supplex et acclinis, 
Cor contritum quasi cinis, 
Gere curam mei finis. 

XVIII. 

Lachrymosa dies ilia, 
Q,ua resurget ex fa villa, 
Judicandus homo reus : 
Huic ergo parce, Deus ! 

The readings of the first stanza at Rome and Paris differ. The former has 
as the second line, " Cruets expandens vexilla" in allusion to the old Romish 
tradition that the " Sign of the Son of Man," to be seen in the heavens on 
his coming to judgment, is the cross. The latter, omitting this line, has 
for its third line, " Teste David cum Sibylla" a reference to the Sibylline or- 
acles, whose genuineness as Christian prophecies seems never in the Me- 
diaeval times to have been questioned, and whose authority Bishop Horsley 
has sought to revive. (Journee du Chretien, Paris, 1810, pp. 82, 84.) This 
seems the more ancient, and, to Protestants, is perhaps the less objection- 
able reading. The closing sentence, " Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis requiem, 
Amen" is a prayer for the dead ; but not having the rhymes of the rest, we 
should suppose the words rather a part of the burial service into which the 
hymn is inlaid, than a portion originally of the hymn itself. 

The closest of the English versions of the Dies Irae, that has fallen under 
the eye of the present writer, is that of the Rev. Richard C. Trench, a cler- 
gyman of the Established Church in England, author of two admirable 
volumes, the one on the Miracles and the other on the Parables of our Lord, 
and editor of " Sacred Latin Poetry, 55 which latter work the present writer 
has failed to see. His rendering does not reach, however, the flowing free- 
dom or full cadences of the original. It is subjoined. 

DIES IR.ZE. 

O that day, that day of ire, 
Told of Prophet, when in fire, 
Shall a world dissolved expire J 

O what terror shall be then, 
When the Judge shall come again, 
Strictly searching deeds of men : 

When a trump of awful tone, 
Thro' the caves sepulchral blown, 
Summons all before the throne. 

What amazement shall o 5 ertake 
Nature, when the dead shall wake, 
Answer to the Judge to make. 

Open then the book shall lie, 
All o 5 erwrit for every eye, 
With a world's iniquity. 

When the Judge his place has ta'en, 
All things hid shall be made plain, 
Nothing unavenged remain. 

What then, wretched ! shall I speak, 

Or what intercession seek, 

When the just man's cause is weak 1 






88 APPENDIX. 

Jesus, Lord, remember, pray, 
I the cause was of thy way ; 
Do not lose me on that day. 

King of awful majesty, 

Who the saved dost freely free ; 

Fount of mercy, pity me ! 

Tired thou satest, seeking me — 
Crucified, to set me free ; 
Let such pain not fruitless be. 

Terrible Avenger, make 

Of thy mercy me partake, 

E'er that day of vengeance wake. 

As a criminal I groan, 
Blushing deep my faults 1 own ; 
Grace be to a suppliant shown. 

Thou who Mary didst forgive, 
And who bad'st the robber live, 
Hope to me dost also give. 

Though my prayer unworthy be, 
Yet, O set me graciously 
From the fire eternal free. 

Mid thy sheep my place command, 
From the goats far off to stand ; 
Set me, Lord, at thy right hand ; 

And when them who scorned thee here 
Thou hast judged to doom severe, 
Bid me with thy saved draw near. 

Lying low before thy throne, 
Crushed my heart in dust, I groan ; 
Grace be to a suppliant shown. 

Another version, earlier than that of Dr. Coles, which has been the subject 
of a reference above, is here for the first time published, as adding another 
to the attempts, in English comparatively few, to preserve the double 
rhymes of the original. 

DIES IRE1. 

I. 

Day of wrath ! that day dismaying ; — 
As the seers of old are saying, 
All the world in ashes laying. 

ii. 
What the fear ! and what the quaking ! 
When the Judge his way is taking, 
Strictest search in all things making. 

in. 
When the trump, with blast astounding, 
Through the tombs of earth resounding, 
Bids all stand, the throne surrounding. 



APPENDIX. 



Death and Nature all aghast are, — 
While the dead rise fastT and faster, 
Answering to their Judge and Master. 

v. 
Forth is brought the record solemn ; 
See, o'erwrit in each dread column, 
With men's deeds, the Doomsday volume. 

VI. 

Now the Sovran Judge is seated : 
All, long hid, is loud repeated ; 
Nought escapes the judgment meted. 

VII. 

Ah ! what plea shall I be pleading 1 

Who for me be interceding, 

When the just man help is needing'? 



Oh, thou King of awful splendor, 
Of salvation free the Sender, 
Grace to me, all gracious, render ! 



Jesus, Lord, my plea let this be, 

Mine the wo that brought from bliss Thee; 

On that day, Lord, wilt Thou miss mel 



Wearily for me thou sough test ; 

On the cross my soul thou boughtest ; 

Lose not all for which thou wroughtest ! 

XI. 

Vengeance, Lord, then be thy mission : 
Now, of sin grant free remission, 
Ere that day of inquisition. 



Low in shame before Thee groaning ; 
Blushes deep my sin are owning : 
Hear, O Lord, my suppliant moaning!. 



Her of old that sinned forgiving, 
And the dying thief receiving, 
Thou, to me too, hope art giving. 



In my prayer though sin discerning, 
Yet, good Lord, in goodness turning, 
Save me from the endless burning ! 



'Mid thy sheep be my place given ; 
Far the goats from me be driven ; 
At thy right hand fixed in heaven. 
13 



90 APPENDIX. 



XVI. 

When the cursed are confounded, 
With devouring flame surrounded ; 
With the blest be my name sounded. 

XVII. 



Bowed and prostrate hear me crying 
Heart in dust before thee lying : 
Lord, my end, O be thou nigh in ! 



Ah that day ! that day of weeping , 
When, in dust no longer sleeping, 
Man to God, in guilt is going : — 
Lord, be } then, thy mercy showing ! 



MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

(Delivered before the Hudson River Baptist Association, June 16, 1835.) 
" I AM PURE FROM THE B.LOOD OF ALL MEN." — Acts XX. 26. 

No writer of the Bible h$s insisted more earnestly than 
did Paul on the great fact of the Divine sovereignty. He 
saw the plan of Infinite wisdom perfect in all its parts, and 
immutable in all its results, stretching away over the whole 
field of his labors ; reaching over every country, and ex- 
tending through all ages, the unchanged and unchangeable 
counsel of God. He rejoiced in it. He rested upon it. 
Yet it did not at all lower his views of human duty, nor 
with him did the Divine agency supersede the workings of 
an inferior and mortal instrumentality. He knew that, with 
all his counsel, nothing could be but as God ordered it ; and 
with all his labor, nothing could prosper but as God wrought 
it. And yet, on the other hand, he saw that the command- 
ments of God to man were part of his counsels for man, 
and that one of the modes in which the Most High would 
work was his sending man to work. While looking at the 
cause of his Master on the one side, he was therefore seen 
soaring away, as on the pinions of seraphim, into the regions 
of fathomless wisdom, and his theme was the election of 
God, sure and indefeasible. Looking at that same cause 
under an opposite aspect, he saw the law of God and the 
duty of man, rising up to cast their shadow as over the 
whole breadth of the earth. He then felt himself a debtor 
to all, and intense was his anxiety lest his skirts should bear 
the blood of any. % 

Fathers and brethren, permit one who feels deeply, that 
in holiness and usefulness, as in the number of years and 
the weight of experience, he is far surpassed by those whom 
he addresses — permit him yet, to lead you to the same point 
of view at which the great Apostle of the Gentiles was often 



92 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

found. Like him, let us look abroad upon the field of duty 
as in the light of eternity. If the superiors of the speaker, 
you are the inferiors of that Saviour to whose feet he would 
summon, and in whose name, as brethren, he warns, or as 
fathers, he entreats you. Forgetting therefore, for the time, 
our relative position, as the younger and the older ministers 
of the New Testament, let us gather in one indiscriminate 
throng around the seat of our common Lord, and hear what 
He hath said to us by the mouth of his holy apostle. And 
give to me your prayers that the Spirit of God may so 
replenish and aid him who speaks, that he may be saved 
from bearing the blood of the souls that now surround 
him. 

Paul appealed to the Ephesian pastors, as his witnesses, 
that, in diligence and devotedness, he had escaped the stain 
of blood-guiltiness. Such stain was possible, or else it was 
idle to rejoice before God in having avoided a danger that 
never existed. His words imply that Christian pastors may 
be guilty of the blood of the souls that perish as under the 
shadow of their sanctuaries. Now they cannot be guilty 
where they have not first been responsible. Let us, then, 
inquire what the Scriptures have said indicating such respon- 
sibility. And if the fact of ministerial accountability for 
the souls of their hearers be found written, broadly and 
vividly, upon the pages of this volume, does it not behoove 
us, then, to inquire the modes, in which, as pastors and 
evangelists, ice may incur this tremendous curse, the blood 
of our people ? And since, in addressing the impenitent, we 
are wont to imitate Paul, and derive from themes of the 
most awful character our appeals to the human heart, and 
" knowing the terrors of the Lord" so to " persuade men," 
let us in the same spirit school ourselves ; and allow a fel- 
low-laborer to bring before you, pastors of the fold of Christ, 
the fearf ulness of the guilt thus incurred — the overwhelm- 
ing horrors of standing at the foot of the throne, with the 
blood of souls on the hand and on the head, perjured stew- 
ards, sentinels false to our trust, and pastors who have 
destrffyed the flock of our charge. 

I. To understand the phrase employed by the apostle, 
here in his intercourse with the Christian pastors of Ephe- 
sus, and at an earlier period in his reply to the Jewish blas- 
phemers of Corinth, it is necessary to refer to the Hebrew 
Scriptures, from which this form of expression was borrowed. 



MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 93 

By the laws of Moses, the Israelite who reared not a battle- 
ment upon the roof of his house, brought upon himself the 
blood of the incautious stranger, who fell and perished in 
consequence of his neglect. He had not indeed lifted the 
murderous weapon ; he had not lain in ambush, or drugged 
the cup of his guest with poison ; nor had he even cherished 
a revengeful feeling or thought of anger. Besides all this, 
the stranger himself must have been careless, thus to perish. 
Yet the absence of any overt act, and even of any thought 
of crime on the part of the host, and the want of due cau- 
tion on the part of his guest, did not relieve the former from 
blood-guiitiness, where he had neglected an enjoined duty. 
So when the murdered traveller was found on the way-side, 
felled by an unknown hand, the elders of the nearest city 
were not exonerated from guilt, and the innocent blood 
would be laid to the charge of the land, unless, washing 
their hands over a slaughtered victim, they would pray to 
God, and solemnly declare that their hands had not shed 
the blood of the hapless stranger, nor had their eyes seen his 
fall. Now here was crime which not only was not com- 
mitted by them, but the commission of which they perhaps 
could not have prevented by any precaution : yet was the 
blood upon them unless they thus protested against the 
deed. It was not then only an overt act of murder which 
condemned them, but the omission of due care, in providing 
that it should not occur, or in denouncing it when it had 
occurred, would also make them chargeable with guilt in 
the eyes of God. The same principle, and with the same 
phraseology to convey it, was carried out into the teachings 
of the prophets. Ezekiel was made a watchman. He was 
to see the coining vengeance, and lift aloud the note of 
warning. If he did it not, the man or the people who 
offended, perished indeed in their iniquity, and wrought out 
their own ruin ; but the minister of God found upon his 
head also the blood of the evil-doer thus cut off in his trans- 
gressions. 

The apostle takes up this language and these principles, 
as being fully applicable to the new dispensation under 
which he labored. He spoke as a man to whom had been 
transferred the charge received by the prophet, who of old 
had seen the visions of God by the river Chebar. It was 
not the Jews only he had warned, for the Ephesian Church 
contained the Gentile as well, and from the blood of all 



94 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY 

men was he free, arid every man had he warned, " testify- 
ing," as he asserts, " both to Jews and to Greeks." It was 
not of civil war, of the ruin of Jerusalem, or of temporal 
death that he warned them ; but as he earnestly appeals to 
them, " repentance and faith" — repentance and faith — had 
been the topics of his warning ; among them he had gone 
" preaching the kingdom of God," and the ministry which 
he had received, and would discharge to others as he had 
done it to them, was " to testify of the Gospel of the Grace 
of God." Grace and the Gospel, then, were not, in his 
view, inconsistent with this appalling responsibility. If he 
had unfaithfully executed his apostolical charge, wo was 
unto him, not only from the tortures of an accusing con- 
science, but from the added curses of a world betrayed and 
ruined by his neglect. But when his work had been fear- 
lessly and fully done, he could turn, as he did to those of 
his own nation at Corinth, and warn them that their blood 
was on their own head ; while, shaking his raiment, he de- 
clared of himself that he was " clear" from the clinging 
curse of their destruction. 

Now it is not merely the number of passages containing 
any doctrine, that decides its certainty ; for a single asser- 
tion of the Holy Ghost is as true, as if it were thrice repeat- 
ed. Had, therefore, the Bible contained nothing further of 
explicit testimony to this effect, it seems as if in the instances 
already quoted, we shall find the responsibility of the Chris- 
tian ministry for the souls of their hearers placed beyond 
question. But there is other evidence, in the teachings of 
human reason, as to the extent of our influence over each 
other, in the language of the Bible with regard to such influ- 
ence, in the descriptions employed to represent the charac- 
ter and office of the Christian minister, and in the express 
testimony of the apostolical epistles, that the pastor owes to 
God an account of the flock, which he was appointed to fold 
and to tend. 

The Bible, in the words already cited, only recognizes a 
great truth, of which even unaided reason gives us testimony 
in part, we mean, the influence of man over man, and his 
evident accountability for the character of the influence that 
he is thus shedding over all around him. The world is 
filled with the countless and interlacing filaments of influ- 
ence, that spread from each individual over the whole face 
and frame-work of society. The infant that lies wailing 



MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 95 

and helpless in the arms of his mother, is already wielding 
an influence felt through the whole household, by his fret- 
fulness disturbing, or by his serene smiles gladdening that 
entire home. And as, with added years, his faculties are 
expanded, and the sphere of his activity widens itself, his 
influence increases. And every man whom he meets, much 
more whom he moulds and governs, becomes the more hap- 
py or the more wretched, the better or the worse, according 
to the character of his spirit and example. Nor can he strip 
from himself this influence. If he flee away from the soci- 
ety of his fellows to dwell alone in the wilderness, he leaves 
behind him the example of neglected duty, and the memory 
of disregarded love, to curse the family he has abandoned. 
Even in the pathless desert he finds his own feet caught in 
the torn and entangled web of influence, that bound him to 
society ; and its cords remain wherever he was once known, 
sending home to the hearts that twined around him, sorrow 
and pain. Nor can the possessor of it expect it to go down 
into the grave with him. The sepulchre may have closed 
in silence over him, and his name may have perished from 
among men, yet his influence, nameless as it is, and untrace- 
able by human eye, is floating over the face of society. As 
in the external and visible world, the fall of a pebble agitates, 
not perceptibly indeed, yet really, the whole mass of the 
earth, thus in the world of morals, every act of every spirit 
is telling upon the whole system of moral beings to which 
God has bound him. No man leaves the world, in all things, 
such as he found it. The habits which he was instrumental 
in forming, may go on from century to century, an heir-loom 
for good or for evil, doing their work of misery or of happi- 
ness, blasting or blessing the country that has now lost all 
record of his memory. In the case of some, this influence 
is most sensible. Every age beholds and owns their power. 
Such men have lived. And thus it is, that, although centu- 
ries have rolled their intervening tide between the age of 
their birth and our own, and the empires under which they 
flourished have long since mouldered away from the soil i 
whence they sprung, and the material frame of the author 
himself has been trampled down into the undistinguished 
dust, the writers of classical antiquity are yet living and 
laboring in our midst. The glorious dreams of Plato are 
yet floating before the eye of the metaphysician, and the 
genius of Homer has tinged with its own light the whole i 



96 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

firmament of modern invention. Nor, unhappily, is this all. 
Corruption is yet oozing out, in lessons of profligacy and 
of atheism, from the pages of an Ovid and a Lucretius, and 
as from their graves streams forth the undecaying rankness 
of vice and of falsehood, though the dominion of the world 
has long since passed from the halls of their Ceesars, and 
the very language they employed has died away from the 
lips of the nation. The Church yet feels, throughout all 
lands, the influence of the thoughts that passed, perhaps in 
the solitude of midnight, through the bosom of Paul, as he 
sat in the shadows of his prison, an old and unbefriended 
man — thoughts which, lifting his manacled hand, he spread 
in his epistles before the eyes of men, there to remain for 
ever. They feel yet the effect of the pious meditations of 
David, when roaming on the hill-side, a humble shepherd 
lad, of the family piety of Abraham, and of the religious 
nurture that trained up the infancy of Moses. Every nation 
is affected at this moment by the moral power that emanated 
from the despised Noah, as that preacher of righteousness 
sat among his family, perhaps dejected and faint with un- 
successful toil, teaching them to call upon God, when all 
the families of the earth beside had forgotten him. And if 
the mind, taking its flight from the narrow precinct of these 
walls, were to wander abroad along the peopled highways, 
and to the farthest hamlets of our own land, and, passing the 
seas, to traverse distant realms and barbarous coasts, every 
man whom its travels met — nay, every being of human 
mould that has ever trodden this earth in earlier ages, or 
that is now to be found among its moving myriads, has felt, 
or is feeling, the influence of the thoughts of a solitary wo- 
man, who, centuries since, stood debating the claims of con- 
science and of sin, amid the verdant glories of the yet unfor- 
feited Paradise. Nor does this influence end with time. 
The shock of the archangel's trump will not break the line 
of its power, nor the gulf of eternity swallow up its steady 
stream. It travels on into the world of spirits. And the 
influence of the pious or the wicked parent, of the faithful or 
unfaithful pastor, will be felt through all the bowers of hea- 
ven, and course its way into all the caverns of hell. The 
benighted pagan, who has, within the last hour, shuddered 
on awaking in eternity to the full view of his doings and 
destiny, will, through the ceaseless lapse of that eternity, 
curse the moral power of the ancestors, through whose 



MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 97 

neglect of Divine Revelation, he himself was born amid the 
starless gloom of heathenism. 

Influence is, then, mighty and enduring. Now, if, as all 
will allow who believe in human accountability, man be 
accountable for his acts, and accountable for his feelings, 
then is he responsible for his influence ; for his acts and 
his feelings are the elements which go to make up that influ- 
ence. And, in proportion to his station and his opportuni- 
ties, his influence growing, there grows with it a correspond- 
ing responsibility. And if the ministry occupy an eminent 
post, and cast abroad a wide influence, as its enemies and 
its friends alike allege, then the man who fills it stands 
answerable to his God and his race, as one bound by high 
and fearful obligations, the cords of which he cannot sever, 
and the burden of which he may not hope to transfer. 

And are not these views taken up and set in a more full 
and appalling light in the Book of Scripture ? See in what 
terms it denounces the guilt of exercising an unholy influ- 
ence. How has the name of Jeroboam been branded with 
reprobation by that fearful repetition — "he made Israel to 
sin." He made Israel to sin, not by the application of brute 
force, not that they ceased to be voluntary agents, (for every 
one of them continued accountable for his individual share 
in the national sin,) but by the moral power of his example 
and authority. It had been the aggravation of their guilt in 
the degenerate sons of Eli, that through their misconduct, 
shedding around a disastrous influence, "men abhorred the 
offering of the Lord," and therefore was their " sin very 
great." And the charge, which in a far distant day Malachi 
brought against the corrupted and corrupting priesthood of 
his own age, was that, whilst their fathers had by a holier 
influence " turned many to righteousness," they themselves 
had by their hypocrisy and scandals " caused many to stum- 
ble at the law." When our Saviour, with an unfaltering 
hand, tore the mask from the Pharisees, he described them 
as blind leaders of the blind. Others fell by their arts, or 
their negligence ; and they drew in the sweeping train of 
their influence multitudes into ruin, as the dragon of the 
Apocalyptic vision dragged down in his fall to the earth a 
third part of the stars of heaven. Of the proselyte whom 
they made with such zeal, and at such cost of effort, our 
Lord declared, that they made him twofold more the child 
of hell than themselves. Not that he was a passive mass of 

14 



98 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

matter to their plastic touch. But the strong hand of their 
moral influence left upon him the imprint of a hopeless 
hypocrisy. He bore about him a conscience which they had 
aided in searing as with a hot iron, and an understanding 
■which they had garrisoned with pride, and walled about with 
prejudices, to guard it from the very access of truth. It is 
of the vast range and power of man's moral influence that 
Christ spoke, when he uttered the ominous words, " Wo 

UNTO THE WORLD BECAUSE OF OFFENCES." It is of OUr 

rigid accounting to our God for the effects of that influence 
that he testifies, when declaring, " But w t o unto that 

MAN BY WHOM THE OFFENCE COMETH." 

But in addition to this general doctrine of influence, the 
Bible uses, in nearly all of its appellations for the office of 
the Christian ministry, terms which imply personal respon- 
sibility for the individuals intrusted to, or operated upon, by 
the Christian teacher. The shepherd answerable for his 
flock, the steward accountable for his lord's goods, the hus- 
bandman laboring and receiving wages or blame according 
to the character of his tillage, the leader by his steps guid- 
ing the steps of others, the overseer exercising a deputed 
authority of which he must return an account to his em- 
ployer, and the ruler controlling others, and responsible for 
the conduct which such control has produced, are favorite 
titles with the inspired writers for the Christian pastor and 
evangelist. Now, do not nearly all of these imply account- 
ability of a very high order as to the souls of men 1 Would 
the shepherd be allowed to cast all the blame of his deso- 
lated fold upon the ravening wolf, or the silly sheep ; or 
would the steward be permitted to refer all his losses to the 
dishonesty of thieves or the wastefulness of servants, if he 
himself had not been careful ? 

As if to end all doubt, we find the apostolic epistles ex- 
plicit in their testimony upon this subject. It is said of 
ministers by Paul in his letter to the Hebrew believers, that 
they watch for souls as those that must give account. 
They hold a fearful stewardship, and it is required in stew- 
ards that a man be found faithful. As to the extent of 
moral influence, he himself speaks of it as operating upon 
all whom the Christian minister met. If not for their salva- 
tion, then was it for their ruin — a savor of death unto death ; 
where it healed not, it hardened, and where it could not 
melt, there it cauterized. And the principle in its broadest 






MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 99 

ground he has adopted in an allusion to ministerial duty, 
where he bids his beloved associate not to become "par- 
taker of Other men's sins." There is then a sense in which 
we may share the sins of others. And so, the death eternal 
which these sins produce, may be in some sense chargeable 
to us. As the vigilant pastor sates himself and those that 
hear him, even thus does the negligent minister destroy not 
only his own soul, but the souls intrusted to his faithless 
hands. 

J)o not the Scriptures, then, brethren, fully publish the 
fact of ministerial accountability for the souls of their hear- 
ers ? The Christian teacher stands not alone, and alone he 
cannot fall. His every act, his internal and hidden spirit, 
are telling day by day on three worlds. Heaven has sent 
forth from its expanded gates angels to minister to his on- 
ward career, or they have returned thither to rejoice over 
the sinners converted by his instrumentality. Hell is pour- 
ing out her hordes to thwart and to seduce, to allure and to 
alarm. And this earth, the great scene of interest, and the 
field of conflict for the two worlds of light and of darkness, 
is benefited or harmed by every step that he takes, as with 
the censer of intercession in his hands, he rushes forth be- 
tween the living and the dead : to stay the desolating pesti- 
lence if he wave that censer aright, looking upward ; and 
if he loiter and neglect it, then standing but to spread the 
contagion he was sent to rebuke. Prayer withheld, or 
prayer offered — labor performed, or labor neglected — faith 
in vigorous exercise, or faith imprisoned in unrighteousness 
— a heart glowing with love to Christ, or a heart chilled 
with worldliness — the Spirit of God grieved, or the Spirit 
of God obeyed — these make up the history of every wakeful 
hour in that man's life. And who shall say, that such a 
man, standing in a relation so close and so momentous to 
this and other worlds, is not responsible for the character of 
each hour, and for the workings of that hour upon the eter- 
nal interests of all that surround him % 

But where, then, are the limits of this influence? Is the 
sinner responsible for nothing? Is the guilt of his impeni- 
tence and ruin solely his pastor's ? — Not so. There is a 
sense in which each of us lives for himself, dies for himself, 
for himself sins, or for himself believes. There is another 
sense, in which none of us lives for himself, dies for him- 
self, for himself alone sins, or believes only for himself. 



100 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

riing to the first of the- Sic a :::ner is chargeable with 
his own ruin, nor shall our unfaithful ministration be any 
plea at the bar o: unconTerted he:. your 

onences. God gai ruce and 

reason, warnings and invitations. You perish in your own 
iniquity. But, according to the latter sense, if you hare 
been left unwarned by friend or teacher, the guilt of that 
iniquity and of your consequent ruin is in part shared by the 
Christian teacher who m »u not. His share in the 

and the punishment makr nr portion of both the 

or the lighter, is :..- union of many accomplices in a 

deed of blocl lessens not their individual criminality, but 

aggravates i:. But it may still be asked, if sinners 

perish at all, is it not always through unfaithfulness on the 

part of the Church ? — We believe not, C: ~ vn preach- 

- ncere and full as it was, did no: :usa- 

The sinner may be warned with perfect fidelity, and 

Christian's responsibility be fully satisfied, and yet the 
sinner perish. If he perish warned of his sin, his blood is 
on his own head. But if the ministry have not been faithful 
to declare to him the whole conn d, and that in the 

right spirit, it is evident that the C: .cher in some 

sense partake- -. and may share the doom of him 

whom he thus neglects or : 

Nor lei b ever be - up posed, that, by thus stating the 
sponsibilities and the influence of man, we forget or dispute 
the great doctrine of the Divine power i: tion. and 

the great doctrine of the Divir^ _nty in the putting 

forth of that power. It is of the grace of God that any are 
saved, and the instrumentality and influence of man. apart 
from that grace, are in themselves idle as the voice of music 
to the stores. It i _rneratethe man. But 

re of God to use in his kingdom human instru- 
mentality, and human influence. I n the duty of man to 
put them forth. It is of the grace of God to bless them 
when put forth. It is of one only of these truths thai 
are now called to treat, that of human duty, and its connec- 
tion in the order of the Divine purposes with the salvation 
of mankind. As the human eye cannot at once behold the 
two opp of the object it confronts, thus is it diifi- 

cult for the mind to bring into one view the two op] 
aspects that belong to every great doctrine of the Bible, 
other great truths to which we have alluded stand up 






MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 101 

in the volume of God in impregnable strength. Fully re- 
ceiving them, it is sufficient now to remark, brethren, as we 
pass, that human agency cannot trench upon them, or pros- 
per without them. 

II. If such be the far-spreading power and the manifold 
and fearful responsibilities of our office, fathers and breth- 
ren, well might the man, who uttered the words before us, 
years after admonish the Colossian pastor Archippus, that 
he should take heed to the ministry which he had received 
of the Lord, that he fulfil it ; and well might he bind upon 
the conscience of his beloved disciple and coadjutor the in- 
junction, that he should make full proof of his ministry. 
And a fittingr termination was it to the announcement of 
such a truth, that he should proceed, as he did, to admonish 
the Ephesian pastors that they take heed therefore to them- 
selves* no less than to all the flock. Wherein have we 
failed to make this fulfilment and full proof of our mini 
For it is not the interests of others alone that are concerned : 
let us look to ourselves, for the responsibilities of our office 
are entwined with our own well-being for time, and through 
eternity. We pass, therefore, to inquire the methods, in 
which we may by remissness have drawn upon our heads 
the blood of the sinners we may have failed to warn. 

Were we to imagine a herald sent forth to the peopled 
villages of a revolted province with the proclamation of his 
prince, charged to promise a free pardon to all who might 
submit, and return to their allegiance, commissioned to de- 
nounce a sure and overwhelming vengeance against all per- 
severing" in their mad rebellion, and instructed withal to 
spread far and wide the royal edict, and to distribute it to 
every group of villagers he should meet by the way-side, 
and to every traveller who shared his journeyings. we can 
readily see in what mode his duties must be discharged, or 
he remain guilty, to his prince of unfaithfulness, and to the 
revolter of a murderous treachery. He might suppress the 
document, and substitute a forgery of his own imagination ; 
or while disclosing it in part, he might interpolate and 
abridge, erase, and amend, suppressing one fact and distort- 
ing another, until the proclamation, as read to the crowds 
who gathered at his feet, might to their ears bring a mean- 
ing utterly alien to that which had stirred the heart of the 
king from whom it emanated. Or, passing to another hamlet, 
he might there, without marring a syllable of the documeut, 



102 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

so dispose of it that few would meet it. Wholly over- 
looking the general dispersion of it through the homes of 
the district, he might content himself with affixing the edict 
on high amid other and ordinary notices, to meet perhaps 
the gaze of a diligent inquirer, but scarce perceptible to the 
casual observer ; and go his way, without further effort to 
bring home to the individuals whom he met their danger 
and their duty, or inquiring, as he passed, who had read and 
who had heeded the momentous instrument. And when 
coming to yet another neighborhood, planted in the bosom 
of some quiet valley, we might see hirn, not without assidu- 
ity, gathering together from its shades and from the hills 
which environed it, the population of the scattered cottages, 
and delivering to the tumultuous crowd the mandate, alike 
unmutilated and incorrupt ; but yet his whole statement 
might be marked with such listlessness, or such levity, and 
be uttered so heartlessly, or so scornfully, that the con 
temptuous group around him might at once adjudge him in 
sincere, and declare the proclamation he bore a forgery of 
no value. And it would be evident that, in all or in either 
of these ways, the very intent of the embassy would have 
been frustrated, and a wrong would have been done to the 
prince thus unfaithfully served, and to the people thus un- 
faithfully warned. And in every battle-field which should 
afterwards be strewed with the slain of the unsuccessful re- 
volters, and on every scaffold on which others of them 
should expiate their treason with their blood, he would be 
to some extent, implicated ; and the blood of the deluded 
villagers would, alike by their kindred and their ruler, be 
asked at his hands. 

Now the gospel ministry is such a proclamation. The 
preacher derives his name from the office of the herald, thus 
publishing to a mingled and busy population the laws or the 
news of the day. And, in any one of the modes thus indi- 
cated, the Christian minister may sin, and bring down upon 
his head the curse of those who have perished through his 
imbecile and faithless demeanor. In the substance of our 
message, in the scene and manner of its delivery, and above 
all, in the spirit that marks its announcement, we may be 
misleading and hardening the souls we were sent forth to 
invite again to their God and ours. And such a three-fold 
fulfilment, as requisite to the Christian ministry, seems inti- 
mated in Paul's description of his own course : " By 



MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 103 

manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every 
man's conscience as in the sight of God." The manifested 
truth described the substance of his ministry ; its commenda- 
tion to every man — the manner of his labor, and his appeal 
to the conscience of the hearer, and his constant sense in 
his own conscience that God was observing him, indicated 
the spirit of his ministry. 

1. In the substance of our ministrations, we may contract 
the guilt of blood by delivering error in the stead of truth, 
and substituting the traditions of men for the testimonies 
and law of God. Or giving one portion of the truth, we 
may make it a virtual falsehood, by withholding the truth 
which in Scripture accompanies and guards it. We may 
preach human dependence to the subversion of the great 
truth of human obligation, or we may so insist on human 
duty and ability, as to mar the glorious truth of the necessity 
of the Divine influences. We may preach a gospel that 
crucifies and tramples upon the law, the eternal and immu- 
table law, that Christ came expressly to magnify : or we 
may hold up the law till it hides that gospel of which it is 
but the precursor and the inferior. And even when we 
bring to the people of our charge the truth symmetrically, 
and in its fair proportions, we may fail to bring the well- 
timed truth adapted to the snares, the duties, and the trials 
of the passing day. We may be combating heresies they 
never knew, and indoctrinating a church who are already 
but too proud of their orthodoxy, and too neglectful of their 
morals ; or we may be preaching practically to those who 
are yet ignorant of the first motives, the seminal principles 
of the Divine life — principles which the doctrines of the 
Bible, and those doctrines only, can minister. And we may 
utter truths not entirely unseasonable, yet comparatively of 
less moment, whilst from the sides of our desk, from our 
pews and our hearths, one and another is sliding into eter- 
nity, untaught in the great lessons of repentance and faith. ! 
We may give an undue and disproportionate attention to 
the necessary, but the minor truths of the Bible, more anxious | 
to make men partisans than Christians ; whilst " the weight- 
ier matters" of its testimony are scarce ever felt by our peo- 
ple, pealing over their heads, as with a voice of mighty 
thunderings, the shortness of life, the nearness of judgment, 
the worth of the soul, the value of the atonement, the need 
of regeneration, and the promises of the wonder-working, 



104 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY, 

Spirit. And what will be the testimony borne against us by 
them, as they awake in the light of eternity to a vivid know- 
ledge of the whole gospel ? Is there not, herein, guilt upon 
us, my brethren % 

2. We may attract the displeasure of our God in our pas- 
toral character, by overlooking the extent and the minute- 
ness of the duties owed to the church in the personal deliv- 
ery and enforcement of truth, or in the scene and mode of 
our labors. We may dispense the gospel too much in the 
generalizations of the pulpit, and too little in the special 
applications of private intercourse. When the apostle 
vouched his own exemption from the curse of blood, he 
declared that he had not ceased day and night to warn eve- 
ry man, and with many tears, and from house to house. 
Although we would not give to these words the rigid inter- 
pretation employed by some, yet is it not but too probable, 
brethren, that we are all deficient in the faithful and earnest 
visitation of the flock, and that the truth is too little urged 
home within the bounds of the family ? And is not much 
of the remissness and worldliness of Christians owing to 
the want of a more thorough endeavor, to follow home the 
impressions of the Sabbath by the less formal and more 
familiar and searching intercourse of the week ? In the 
world, is not our ministry defective, by resembling too 
faintly that of the primitive church, in its aggressive char- 
acter, against the mass of impenitent and unsanctified mind, 
that never enters our sanctuaries, and which must be sought 
out and assailed in its own lurking-places ? And if not able 
ourselves to accomplish the work, need we not in our 
churches to sustain a distinct class of men who shall thus 
go forth upon the world, and leave no home, where man is 
wretched and man is sinful, unvisited by that gospel, which 
reveals the only remedy of his wretchedness, and the only 
hope for his guiltiness ? Should not the wonderful success 
which crowned the faithfulness, in this work, of Baxter at 
Kidderminster, be resounding in the ears of us all, until we 
had attempted a similar onset upon the hearths of our own 
neighborhoods ? And is there not in our churches the guilt 
of blood, in our failing to maintain the high and severe 
standard of primitive discipline, delivering the gospel to 
the world anew in the holy lives of its professed disciples ? 
Shall not the blood of the covetous, and formal, and sensual, 
the drunkards, extortioners, and revilers, that lurk in the 



MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 105 

church, suspected or well known, but not warned or cen- 
sured, cry out against us ? Hardened, as they are, by im- 
punity, shall not that impunity be loudly pleading against 
us in the great day of retribution ? We preach the truth ; 
is it enforced, and doled out anew upon the world, in the 
discipline of our churches ? Yet again, would not Paul 
have been guilty, had he, in teaching the Ephesians, forgot- 
ten the more destitute of other lands ; or had he neglected 
to inculcate upon the converts at Ephesus their duty in 
sending the gospel to the lands that were yet unevangelized ? 
Paul and the Christians whom he now addressed, would not 
have been clear of the blood of the heathen, had they for- 
gotten them in their prayers, and confined their labors ex- 
clusively to the narrow province of their own home. Illyr- 
icum, and Spain, and Britain, were probably in the heart 
of the apostle, while his hands were ministering to his own 
wants at Ephesus. The gospel he preached was for the 
world ; and he preached it in blood-guiltiness, if he did not 
regard and teach others to regard it, as going out over the 
length and breadth of the earth. And although God has 
blessed the Church and the pastors of the present age, with 
the spirit of missionary enterprise, is there not yet a defi- 
ciency ? Are not the garments of the church and her pas- 
torship yet dripping with the blood of pagan nations, acces- 
sible but not approached by the word of God ? And here 
again, is there not guilt, the guilt of blood upon us, my 
brethren ? 

3. But the greatest of the dangers, as we believe, to which 
those now present are exposed, regards the spirit in which 
we utter our message. We may deliver the true proclama- 
tion in hypocrisy, and an angered God withhold from our 
labors all blessing. Or, by formality and listlessness, we 
may contrive to throw an aspect of tameness over the most 
momentous and thrilling of all topics, and the vast realities 
of eternity may dwindle under our hands into a thrice-told 
and vapid " old wives' fable." In selfish avarice and ambi- 
tion, we may be coveting with an evil covetousness to set 
our house on high, and build up our personal and social 
interests on the base of God's own church. There may be 
bitter envying and strife amid the common members of one 
mystical body, and the fellow-combatants in one strenuous 
and hard-fought warfare. We may grieve in secret at the 
fulness of the net which our own hands cast not abroad 

15 



106 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

upon the face of the waters, or drew not to the shore. We 
may enact again the contest rebuked by Christ, and whisper 
to ourselves, " Who is the greatest?" when in lowliness 
each should esteem others better than himself. Vain-glory 
and ostentation may be our companions in the study, and 
mount with us into the sacred desk ; and while the famished 
church is weeping, and fiends exult over the world rushing 
into ruin at our feet, we may be busily employed in endea- 
voring to carve our paltry names upon the rugged front of 
Christ's own cross. We may preach ourselves, and not the 
Master. While bound to seek out acceptable words, we 
may proceed too far, and harm the sword of the Spirit by 
gilding and blunting its edge. Self-reliance and self-seek- 
ing may palsy our spiritual strength ; and we may but beat 
the air, and labor in vain. While men admire, God may be 
writing upon us his fearful curse as pronounced by his 
servant Zechariah : " Wo to the idol shepherd — the sword 
shall be upon his arm, and upon his right eye : his arm 
shall be clean dried up, and his right eye shall be utterly 
darkened." Spiritual vigor and spiritual discernment may 
depart from us, while bowing in secret at the shrine of van- 
ity. Or carelessness, and frivolity, and worldliness, may 
e it out the heart of our strength, and we may lie along in 
the church, the prostrate and rotting cumberers of the field 
we should have shaded with o^r foliage, and gladdened 
with our fruit. How difficult is it, brethren, to guard well 
our own hearts — to act ever as in the love of Christ — and 
to preach in sight of the bar of judgment. And even where 
we may be preserved watching and praying against the 
evils already indicated, how far may our piety be beneath 
the high standard commanded by our God, and attainable 
to us. How little, brethren, is our profiting, compared 
with that which it might be, did we, like the bride of the 
Apocalypse, stand before the churches " clothed with the 
sun" — were there seen upon our example, our prayers, and 
our preaching, the lustre of a dazzling holiness, derived 
from intimate communion with God, and sending even into 
the eyes of the scoffer its vivid and blinding brightness. 
And shall we not be judged by the possible and attainable 
standard which was before us ? Look to the wide and deep 
influence which has been gained by some devoted men in 
all ages, who, though often of inferior talents, were men 
mighty in prayer, in faith, and in the Holy Ghost. See 



MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 107 

how the hearts of the world and the church melted at the 
opening of their lips — how the Spirit of Glory and of God 
tracked all their steps ; and, turning from the sight, let us 
ask : — Why are we not all such ? We need a deeper piety, 
and the guilt of blood is upon us — is it not, brethren ? — be- 
cause we are not men of deeper piety, men baptized with 
the Holy Ghost, and testifying to the churches what our 
own eyes have seen, and our own hands have handled of the 
word of life. 

Are we accused of disparaging our vocation ? Our reply 
may be in the quaint, but expressive language of Baxter : 
*' Had our sins been only in Latin, in Latin they might 
have been rebuked ; but if our transgressions have been 
wrought before the people, in the tongue, and before the 
eyes of the people must they be assailed and confessed." 
We are crying out against the dangers of the church from 
the rampant infidelity of the age. But, alas, it is not the 
feathered and barbed shaft of Voltaire, the refined scepti- 
cism of Hume and Gibbon, or the coarser blasphemies of a 
Paine, a Taylor, or a Carlisle, that most endanger us. Ra- 
ther need we fear and deprecate the infidelity of the church, 
the practical scepticism of the lukewarm pastor, the effect- 
ive atheism of a worldly, and a time-serving, a vain-glorious, 
and a selfish ministry. It is not the most specious or the 
most active of the speculative heresies of the day, that we 
have cause, brethren, so much to dread, as the heresy of 
heart found in Christ's own church — the want of a purer 
love, and a simpler faith, and a more vigorous hope. We 
cannot afford the time requisite to decide the nicer contro- 
versies of the day among true brethren, while this, the great 
controversy of the church with her God, remains undecided. 
Our sin against the commandment that bids us love our God 
is as fearful a heresy as any in the list invented and propa- 
gated by human perverseness. No, brethren, it is not a 
fitting season for the church to be compounding unguents 
for the freckled skin of a fancied, or at most, a frivolous 
heresy ; while the plague of lukewarmness is sweeping her 
streets, and the bier of spiritual death is passing on its way 
from door to door of her habitations. We have another 
and a sterner quarrel to settle. The stain of blood — of the 
blood of souls, is on the floor of our deserted and untrodden 
closets — upon our pulpits — upon our communion tables. 
It is, as the prophet of old witnessed, "not found by secret 



108 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

search, but openly, and upon all these." And yet we feel 
it not, or acknowledging it, we do not aright apprehend and 
repent of the evil of our ways. 

III. Lastly, then, let us, brethren, endeavor to fasten upon 
our sluggish hearts the sense of the fearful character of the 
guilt thus incurred. We may learn it by looking to the 
worth of the soul. Is the life of the body, though so soon 
to terminate, guarded by all the terrors of earthly law — is 
the murderer so sternly hunted, and so sorely punished ; 
and is there no guilt in flinging away, or in aiding others to 
cast away the life of the soul, its happiness and well-being, 
not for threescore years only, but for ages multiplied upon 
ages, and yet making no unit in the fearful sum of its eter- 
nity ? Is the hand of the lapidary cautious when touching 
the gem whose very dust is precious ? Is the touch of the 
surgeon most delicate, but most firm, when probing or sev- 
ering the organs of our bodily frame : and what shall not 
be our care who have to do with the soul of man, so deli- 
cately framed, so easily and irremediably injured — that soul 
which is to sparkle as a gem on the Mediator's brow through 
all ages, or to suffer under the venom of unhealed sin in the 
ever-growing pangs of the second death? The worth of 
the gospel, neutralized by unfaithfulness in the ministry, 
that gospel which angels announced with songs of gratula- 
tion — which was sealed with the blood of a dying God — 
and which bears the only hope of life for the world, affords 
another standard by which to test the character of our guilt, 
if we fail to declare it in its whole counsel. The high 
claims of the church, narrowed and famished, and degraded 
by pastoral infidelity, bid us to awake ; for if any man defile 
the temple of God, him shall God destroy. The fearful 
dishonor brought upon the name of that God, who will be 
sanctified in all them that come nigh him, may well fill us 
with dread. And the thought of the wide-spread influence 
we are to exercise through all time and through eternity, 
may well cause the stoutest heart to quail. Another argu- 
ment might be derived from the brevity of the life we waste, 
and from its singleness. We have but one life — it is soon 
spent, and suddenly as well as speedily may it be ended. 
The dying are around us. They fill the seats of our sanc- 
tuaries. They are at our boards, by the way they meet, 
and in the house they surround us.* Riches, and fame, 
earthly lore, and earthly power — what arc they to the dying 



MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 109 

man? How soon will all earthly distinctions fade away 
from before the eye, as it glazes and settles in the last strug- 
gle — and mock the grasp of dying agony. We are from 
eternity. For it we live. Of it we testify. To it we pass. 
Into that world of waking reality this life of dreams and 
shadows is fast bearing us. Our kindred are there. The 
former occupants of our pews are there. Ears that once 
listened to the voice of our teachings are now filled with 
the songs of the seraphim, or tingle with the cry of the de- 
spairing and the lost. Eyes that have gazed into ours, as 
we have looked down from the pulpit, have already seen 
the Judge of all the earth. 

What yet remains for them, and for us ? — Men of God, I 
cite you to his bar. Yet a little while, and we stand before 
the great white throne. The judgment is set. The books 
are opened. Heaven and earth have passed away before 
the glance that is transfixing our hearts. The history of 
every day, the motives of every sermon, the morbid anato- 
my of the soul, are bared to an assembled universe ; and 
we with all the dead, stand up to give an account of the 
deeds done in the body. Who would then take the fearful 
tiara of the papacy, lined with the curses of its deluded mil- 
lions ? Who would then wear the earthly honors of the 
faithless pastor ? " And who shall live when God doeth 
this ?" exclaimed an able but false-hearted prophet of former 
times. Who of us shall live when God doeth this, may we, 
taking up his lament, and prolonging it, say, for who may 
abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he 
appeareth ? Blessed be his name, the sentence is not yet 
pronounced. The books are not yet written out. On the 
leaf yet uninscribed, and perhaps the last, let us write our 
weeping penitence. For yet is there hope in Israel con- 
cerning this thing. 

Oh, is it not from such scenes that we turn with deepest 
sensibility to the Cross of Christ ? Were it not for the 
fountain opened in the house of David, were we not, breth- 
ren of the ministry, of all men most miserable ? From his 
multiplied snares, from his burdensome sins, how delightful 
for the Christian pastor is it thither to flee, and to plunge 
in its cleansing and quickening streams. How vivid, when 
viewed after such contemplations, how vivid in beauty, and 
how vast the wealth of the promises which assure us the 
aid of the Spirit, and the workings of that Power by which 



110 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

the weak are made strong, and the foolish wise. Upon our 
Master we will cast ourselves. Often have we provoked 
him, but never has he spurned us. For the sake of his 
goodness, and his free and repeated forgiveness of our con- 
stant transgressions, will we endeavor to preserve our gar- 
ments henceforth unspotted. Shall we loiter, or trifle, or 
engage in petty bickerings, or turn aside at the beck of 
sense or of pleasure ? God helping us, brethren, we will 
not ; for behind us are heard the steps of the avenger of 
blood, before us gleam the crown of righteousness and the 
palm of victory, and the pealing anthems of the blessed are 
heard in the distance. No, we will quit the plain of worldly 
strife, of sensual and secular pursuits, and climb the rugged 
mount of communion and transfiguration. We will relax 
our grasp of the polluting and perplexing vanities of this 
life, that we may set our affection on things above, where 
Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. We will move 
onward through the people of our charge, as those who shall 
lead or follow them to the grave, and meet them again in 
the judgment. We will pass along, intent on this one 
thing, the glory of God in the salvation of souls. We will 
be the men of one book, aiming to throw over the literature 
and the arts of life, over the scenes of business and retire- 
ment, over man in all stations and under every aspect, its 
hallowed light. Our eyes have seen there the descending 
glories of an opened heaven. We have looked downward 
upon a world sinking into the flaming abyss of hell. We 
have heard the commandment that we pluck men out of the 
fiery torrent. Where is our strength ? Conscious of our 
utter weakness, we will fling ourselves back on Him who 
was our own deliverer — we will ask the Spirit of God in 
the name of Christ, and girt in his strength, we will labor, 
praying to make it, with holy Paul, our dying declaration : 
I have fought a good fight ; I have finished my course ; 
1 have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me 
a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the Righteous 
Judge, shall give me in that day, when the pure in heart 
and the clean of hands shall see God. 



THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH NEEDED FOR 
HER RISING MINISTRY. 

(Delivered before the N. Y. Baptist Education Society, August 18, 1835.) 

" Making mention of you in my prayers ; that the God of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the 
spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him : the eyes 

OF YOUR UNDERSTANDING BEING ENLIGHTENED." — EpheSianS L 16, 17, 18. 

Prayer for the descent of the Spirit upon the Church 
had been among the last employments of Paul's Lord and 
Master, as He was girding himself for the scenes of Geth- 
semane and Calvary. Even when the Holy Ghost had come 
in answer to the requests of our Great Advocate, the inter- 
cessions of the saints for each other were yet needed to pro- 
long and to deepen the influences of the Heavenly Visitant. 
To gain these intercessory supplications of the church be- 
came then an object of high moment. How earnestly Paul 
besought for himself, that his disciples and fellow-confessors 
should remember him in their approaches to the mercy-seat, 
is apparent on the most cursory reading of his epistles. In 
the present letter to the Ephesian saints, in each of those 
which he addressed to the Thessalonian church, in the sec- 
ond of his epistles to the Corinthians, in those to the churches 
at Colosse and Philippi, in his private letter to Philemon, 
and his general one to the Hebrew believers, the same re- 
quest for their prayers is urged upon various grounds, but 
in all these eight epistles with marked, and, at times, impor- 
tunate earnestness. 

What he asked of his brethren for himself he was ready 
in turn to impart for their benefit. He loved prayer, and 
practised it himself, as he enjoined it upon others, " without 
ceasing." To the ministry of the word and to prayer he 
had, like the apostles who were in Christ before him, given 
himself, as to the one proper employment of his office, and 
the future business of his life. The evidence of his conver- 
sion, by which our Lord reassured the suspicious Ananias, 



112 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 

was, "Behold he prayeth." When with Silas he occupied 
the dungeons of Philippi, he broke the silence of midnight 
with the voice of prayer : when parting on a former occa- 
sion from the elders of this same Ephesian church, and when 
bidding farewell to the disciples at Tyre, prayer lightened 
their mutual regrets, and gave voice to their mutual affec- 
tion. When himself receiving in the temple at Jerusalem 
the vision of his Lord that sent him to the far Gentiles, and 
when healing the father of Publius at Malta, his previous 
preparation had been found in prayer. And to the last days 
of his life he remained in this exercise, true to the church 
and to her great Head, even as he was seen entering the 
skirts of that dark storm, which seized him and bore him 
upward to his heavenly rest. Amid sorrow and loneliness 
he breathes neither dejection nor misanthropy ; but we find 
him assuring his beloved scholar, that without ceasing he 
had remembrance of him in his prayers night and day. A 
like touching pledge of Christian affection he had already 
given to his friend Philemon, to the Ephesian and the Co- 
lossian churches, as well as to those at Philippi, Thessalo- 
nica, and Rome, to all of whom he avers a similar mindful- 
ness of them in his private supplications. Thus it was, that 
even from the chariot of bloody triumph, which wafted him 
to his Father's house, there was seen falling the mantle of 
his example and his prayers, to bless that militant church, in 
Avhose sorrows and warfare he might no longer share. 

And upon whom did the great apostle of the uncircum- 
cision here invoke the descent of the Holy Ghost, as a spirit 
of wisdom and revelation ? Not upon those who knew not 
God, and whose eyes had not yet been opened to discern 
the glories of the Saviour ; but upon men whom he con- 
gratulated as " the faithful in Christ Jesus " and " the saints 
which were at Ephesus." Nor by his prayer for the en- 
lightening of their understandings did he impeach their 
society of any peculiar imbecility or ignorance. In their 
libraries had been found volumes of unhallowed and magical 
lore, amounting in value to fifty thousand pieces of silver. 
Their ability to study these implied some general knowledge, 
and a taste for such researches required some measure of 
native talent and sagacity ; and it rendered probable also 
the possession and the mastery of at least some volumes of 
a sounder literature. Nor was it for a crowd of rude and 
untaught converts, the ill-fed flock of some incompetent 



NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 113 

shepherd, that he supplicated the heavenly gift ; but for a 
favored church who had long profited by the ministrations 
of an apostle, and whom he himself had for the space of 
three years ceased not to warn night and day with tears — 
to whom he had given alike private admonition and more 
public instructions, and who in addition to his personal 
addresses were now receiving his written counsels. But 
though thus bred in heathen scholarship, and taught by an 
apostolical pastorship, and although . thus anxiously and 
fondly cared for by these the " labors more abundant " of 
an inspired teacher, they needed still the aids of the Holy 
Ghost to open the eyes of their understanding. It had not 
yet become a needless petition to be offered for them, that 
they might receive the spirit of wisdom ; nor was it an un- 
timely request on their behalf, that to them might be more 
largely given the spirit of revelation in the knowledge of 
Christ. If ever there were a splendid exemplification of 
the fact that the doctrine of the Divine Influences does not 
foster indolence, and that, again, human industry does not 
supersede the necessity of the Spirit's aids and agency, it 
was here, in a church so ably and so assiduously taught, yet 
the objects of such impassioned prayer — for whom Paul 
labored as if he were the only keeper of their souls, and for 
whom he prayed as if Providence had placed the charge of 
their souls entirely beyond the reach of his personal efforts. 
You are convened, fathers and brethren, as the friends of 
ministerial education. It were needless to labor in proving 
its necessity to men who have already decided the question 
in their own minds, and whose presence in these scenes may 
well be regarded as sufficient warrant for supposing them 
convinced of its importance. But is it unseasonable to re- 
mind you, brethren, that more than human agency is needed 
in the education of the ministry — that the great work of 
training up the Christian and the Christian pastor is not 
confided to your faltering hands alone — but that the instruc- 
tion of the church and of the teachers of the church is to be 
commenced and consummated by the Holy Ghost, as a 
superior agency enveloping and making effective your infe- 
rior instrumentality 1 With all your wise provision for dis- 
ciplining your younger brethren, ere they go forth bearing 
the banner of Christ, the trumpet and the sword of the gos- 
pel, into the field of battle, you will not forget that your 
interest with the Great Captain of the Lord's Host is yet 

16 



114 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 

more needed to be exerted in their behalf. For him who 
speaks, then — for your own churches — for the whole family 
of our Lord upon earth — and, especially, at the present time, 
for this school of the prophets, let me beseech you, like the 
apostle before us, to implore the gifts of the Holy Ghost. 
Ask the counsellings of Divine Wisdom, and the illumina- 
tions of the Uncreated Light. And to this end bear with 
me, in reminding you of the need which the theological 
student has for your prayers, first, from his present snares, 
and next, from his future influence, and lastly, in urging 
upon you your consequent duty to continue instant in your 
supplications for him. 

I. While exposed, in common with yourselves, to all the 
other temptations that belong to the depravity of his own 
heart, the character of the evil world around him, and of the 
Evil One that rules it, and subjected in addition to the pecu 
liar besetments of his youthful age, let it not be forgotten, 
that in his very studies, necessary as they may be, there are 
found perils of formidable character. Many of these will at 
once suggest themselves. He is in danger of converting the 
season of leisure and the scenes of retirement here allowed 
him into the refuge of indolence. Or, if studious and suc- 
cessful, he may be infected with the pride of learning, and 
lose the docility of Christ's disciple. Or, forgetting the dis- 
tinction between knowledge and wisdom, he may crowd the 
chambers of the soul with the furniture of a useless or frivo- 
lous learning, until the mind is converted into a magnificent 
lumber-room, where the great truths of Christian faith and 
duty have little space left them to live and to work. By 
unskilfulness in the discipline of the mind, he may walk 
forth into the scene of strife with this world and its vanities, 
armed without, but enfeebled within — burdened and crippled 
by the ill- chosen armor in which he has been pleased to 
incase himself, and felled to the earth, at the first onset,, by 
the weight of his own ill-managed lore. Or in studies well- 
selected and vigorously pursued, he may exert himself to 
purpose ; but it may be, that all is done from an unholy 
rivalry, or with regard to earthly lucre or earthly honor. 
And he may thus go forth into the world, crowned with the 
chaplet of academic distinction, while from every leaf of that 
chaplet the mildew of Clod's curse, breathed over his selfish- 
ness and earthliness, is ("ailing, and blasting the labors of his 
hands wherever it falls. All the peculiar snares of the 



NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 115 

student's life it were impossible now to discuss : let us but 
advert to some of the more common, though often unsus- 
pected, evils that beset him. 

1. The first of these to which we would now allude, as 
one against which he needs to be guarded by your prayers, 
is that of losing his sympathy with ordinary and uneducated 
mind. As his own intellect acquires vigor and expansion, 
he may learn to pass rapidly, and with ease, through trains 
of reasoning, which are without interest, or which may even 
be unintelligible, to others who have not been conducted 
through the same routine of preparation. And forgetting 
this fact, while pursuing a track of research, which to his 
own mind teems at every step with objects of interest, and 
where on every hand breaks out some new and delightful 
vision, he may be traversing scenes into which no common 
auditory can follow him, and whilst he hurries on, delighted 
himself, and confident of delighting others, his hearers may 
be toiling in perplexity far behind him, wondering at the 
speed of his course, and bewildered as to the object and 
end of his journeyings. The art of simplifying his know- 
ledge needs perpetual study. As in his subjects of thought, 
so in the language with which he learns to invest his favorite 
themes, he may unintentionally and insensibly lose sight of 
the people, and, forgetting their simpler idioms, mid his 
thoughts naturally fall into terms metaphysical and abstract, 
with which men in general are little familial, and towards 
which they may be disposed to show little patience. The 
same estrangement from the common mind may be gradually 
imbibed from the spirit of much of the literature with which 
he becomes conversant. Much of Greek, and nearly all of 
Roman letters, breathes a proud oblivion or contempt of the 
commonalty. The scornful sentiment of one of the most 
celebrated of Latin poets, "hate for the profane rabble," is 
but too faithfully reflected from the pages of ancient schol- 
arship. Through a large portion of the literature even of 
Christian lands, the same feeling, not avowed indeed, yet 
but too evident, lives and breathes. And by a gradual as- 
similation to the models of classic beauty, a student may find 
the spirit of alienation from the popular intellect diffusing 
itself over his mind and labors, even while preparing to pub- 
lish abroad that gospel, of which it was once the high boast 
and the heavenly seal — that it was preached to the poor. 
.Visiting the lowly and the ignorant, it told them in the 



116 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 

simplest words, and by the aid of the most familiar imagery, 
of glories celestial and divine, before which the proudest 
splendors of pagan morality and the most gorgeous visions of 
heathen poetry waned and grew pale. Against this tendency 
to lose his hold upon the common mass of an audience, it is 
no small part of a wise education to guard. Yet, on the 
other hand, let it not be forgotten, that no man can long 
profit or guide the minds of a people, who is not himself in 
mental power or furniture raised above them. 

2. Another of the evil influences which often engross the 
mind of the scholar devoted to prolonged and solitary study, 
is the love of fame. Harshly as the accusation may fall on 
the ears of some, it is but too certain that the mass of litera- 
ture, even in the lands now most thoroughly evangelized, is 
idolatrous in its spirit and tendencies. More covert indeed, 
but not less impious, than the paganism which defiles the 
monuments of Greek and Roman genius, it is yet but idol- 
atry, a decent and baptized idolatry. It teaches the student 
principles of action and a strain of feeling essentially hea- 
thenish. The love of fame for its own sake is boastfully 
avowed as the scholar's great incentive : to live in the mem- 
ories and upon the tongues of other ages, is the guerdon of 
his toils and sacrifices. As the great motive for action, this 
is a principle as sternly rebuked in the New Testament, as 
is that covetousness which bars against its votary the gates 
of heaven. It is a principle of which our Saviour explicitly 
testified, in the case of the Pharisees, that because they 
were guided by it, seeking honor one of another, they could 
not believe, and therefore could not be saved. 

3. Another evil of that literature with which the theologi- 
cal student must in his studies become more or less intimate, 
is the blind worship of genius, as an object of admiration 
for its own sake, and apart from the moral uses to which it 
is devoted. This is a leprosy that has scarred the whole 
literature of the present age. Mental power, though em- 
ployed only to corrupt, to mislead, or to oppress, is deified, 
with as much reason as men might ascribe divine honors to 
the whirlwind for its might, or to the volcano for its powers 
of wide-spread desolation. The resplendent skin and shin- 
ing crest of the serpent win for him a place in the bosom, 
though a serpent still ; and the polish and symmetry of the 
arrow give it value in our eyes, though its point is known 
to be tipped with deadly venom, and its barbs are yet red 



NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 117 

with the blood of former victims. This should not be so. 
To him that seeks the welfare of his country, and knows 
how much her social well-being depends upon the purpose 
and purity of her popular literature, it is indeed matter of 
sorrow and of alarm that any moral obliquity and the gross- 
est and most hideous depravity may win patient and admir- 
ing listeners, if it only come playing the pander, with the 
voice of melody, and the garb and air of refinement. This 
insane idolatry of genius may gradually discolor even the 
views of the youth who has dedicated himself to minister at 
the altar of God ; and he who should become the Aaron of 
the camp may be its Achan. The Babylonish garment and 
the golden wedge may be secretly pilfered from the spoils 
devoted by God's just wrath to utter destruction and obliv- 
ion ; and he who should have shown himself the intercessor 
and guardian of the church, may prove, like Diotrephes or 
Ahab, the troubler of Israel. Before the tribunal which 
awaits us, it is not power, but the rightful use of power ; it 
is not wealth, but the proper employment of our pittance or 
our opulence ; it is not talent, but the motives with which 
and the modes in which talent exerted itself, that shall bring 
honor to the possessor. Yet a little while, and we are there. 
But meanwhile, how many myriads may be lost for ever by 
that irrational admiration of irreligious genius, and that 
blind love of human applause, which are as the plague-spots 
of our popular literature. 

4. Oppositions of science falsely so called became, even 
under the eyes of an apostle, an occasion to many of erring 
from the faith. Akin to the worship of great names in lite- 
rature, and often found resulting from it, is that presumptu- 
ous and unprofitable speculation which has at times invaded 
the schools of the church. Dogmatizing where the Scrip- 
ture was silent, or running into perplexed refinements where 
the Scripture held its usual tone of plain and practical good 
sense, men have introduced error upon error into the church 
of former ages, and our own may not hope for exemption. 
They who have arisen to combat the new delusion have 
often, with the natural infirmity of the human mind, done so 
by evoking and patronizing some opposite error — the an- 
tagonist indeed of the first, but equally fatal with it to the 
true interests of religion. And learning and talent have 
clustered and glowed around the contending theories, until 
the whole heavens were illumined by the lustre of two 



118 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 

contending systems, adverse and opposite in all else, save in 
this — that both were alike lawless and eccentric meteors, 
splendid as they were baleful, gazed upon with admiration 
by the upturned eyes of wondering multitudes, yet proving 
themselves at last but magnificent heresies and wandering 
stars to which was reserved the blackness of darkness for- 
ever. Into the shades of academic retirement such errors 
may yet find their way. And in the endowments furnished 
by the piety and liberality of one age, the next may see in- 
stalled heresies which the original founders of the institution 
would have indignantly denounced as the foulest blasphe- 
mies. To preserve alike individuals and institutions from 
this eating canker of unsound doctrine, creeds will not 
fully avail, nor any barrier of human invention. Anxious 
denunciation will not avert or remedy the evil, but only the 
Spirit of God, sought and won by fervent prayer. Nor can 
any precautions merely human check the growth of these 
evils. They are not the proper fruit of Theological Semi- 
naries, although those schools may at times afford a favora- 
ble scene for their development. The abolition of every 
Theological Seminary in the land would not effect the ex- 
tinction of errors. They would still spring up as the native 
growth of the unsanctified heart, starting in irrepressible 
freshness from a root which human skill cannot reach, and 
which no power merely of earth has ever succeeded in ex- 
tirpating. 

5. But perhaps the chief danger of the youthful student is 
to be feared, not so much in the infusion of positive error 
into his doctrinal system, as in his studying the truth merely 
as an exercise of the understanding, without securing its due 
influence on the heart. It is possible for us to investigate 
the gospel — the true and life-giving gospel — merely as a 
science, and to delude ourselves, and to curse the church 
with that heartless form of sound knowledge which may be 
called the Religion of the Intellect. By this we here in- 
tend, not merely a false system, wrought out by the self- 
coniidence of an unsanctified intellect, neglecting and amend- 
ing the Scriptures, a class of errors which the term might 
well include ; but we intend, at present, by it to describe 
only that reception of the truth itself which gives it no lodg- 
ment in the affections, and allows it no control over the life ; 
which examines the Scriptures but as furnishing a system to 
be learned and defended, and comes not to them as to oracles 



NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 119 

claiming our obedience — as to promises upholding, and 
precepts guiding, and penalties guarding the spiritual life 
of the inquirer himself. Now it is possible for a student to 
attain in this mode a full and correct knowledge of the great 
outlines of Christian faith ; while the spirit of the gospel is 
an utter stranger to his bosom, and of its great mysteries he 
has no practical experience, and with its informing life he 
has no communion or sympathy. The distinction which 
may thus exist between a familiarity with the external forms 
of any science and its actual mastery, may be illustrated by 
a reference to the scenes of worldly activity. A man may 
discern and relish, in a writing which he peruses, the strength 
of its logic and the ornaments of its rhetoric, and yet all this 
delight might consist in his mind with an utter indifference, 
or a hearty distaste, to the object and purport of the writing. 
His scholarship might give him an intelligent admiration of 
the vehicle into which the thought had been cast, while his 
prejudices, or his habits, or his interest, might lead him to 
look upon the cause which it advocated with an uncom- 
promising hostility.* Thus, to illustrate our meaning, might 
we imagine the instrument that severed our people from 
their dependence upon the mother-country, and asserted our 
claims to a separate station and an equal rank among the 
nations of the earth, finding its way on its first promulgation, 
over mountain and forest, until it lighted down upon some 
remote hamlet, where it was seized and scanned with an 
eager curiosity. And among the group, who were gathered 
to listen to that portentous instrument, might be found the 
teacher of the neighboring peasantry ; and into his hands, 
with one consent, that Declaration might be put, that he 
should read it to the anxious crowd pressing around him. 
And in scholarship he might be the only one of the number 
qualified to appreciate the literary merit of that great instru- 
ment, or the moral daring of the attitude in which it placed 
our country. And the beauty of its style and the force of 
its sentiments might extort the man's reluctant applause, 
and his heart might yield a passing homage to the bold mag- 
nanimity of the statesmen who had planned and published 
it ; whilst the whole current of his feelings and wishes placed 
him in determined and deadly opposition to the cause it 
represented. And at the side of this man so competent to 
estimate the document, but withal so set in heart against it, 
might stand some illiterate ploughman, himself unable to 



120 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 

read the instrument to which he had listened with a breath- 
less interest, and still less qualified to descry any literary 
beauty it might possess. And yet the man's whole soul 
might be seen kindling with sympathy for its spirit — in his 
bosom alone it might have met with congenial elements : 
and while others are staying to praise its sentiments, or to 
admire its phrases, his patriotism might have borne him 
homeward, to bid a hurried farewell to the inmates of his 
home ; and the morrow, while it found his neighbors still 
busy in pondering the literature of the act, might have 
dawned upon that unlettered patriot upholding the act itself 
in the tented field, and prepared to pour out his blood in 
enforcement of a document, whose words he could not have 
spelled out to the children he had forsaken. And even such 
may be the difference between an intimate acquaintance with 
the literature of the Bible, and an honest, but withal, an un- 
lettered submission to the Bible as the charter of our own 
personal hope. 

Yet such is the infatuation of mankind on the subject of 
religion, that a heartless but intelligent admiration of the 
Scripture literature is often supposed by its possessor to be 
proof of his advancement in true religion. And the scholar, 
blinded by vain-glory, may go on flattering himself and 
astounding his age, with the mass and splendor of his criti- 
cal acquisitions in illustration of the Scriptures, while he is 
farther from any real knowledge of its contents than the 
ignorant slave, whose range of knowledge never extended 
to the reading of one word in the pages of that volume, but 
who throws himself back on his couch, cheered in his dying 
hour, penetrated to the heart, and sanctified, and saved, by 
the truths of that Bible which was known to him only from 
the lips of others. 

Before overvaluing, as we are too prone to do, the results 
of biblical criticism, let us remember that a thorough ac- 
quaintance with the original dialect of an evangelist, and a 
perfect and most applauded familiarity with the customs of 
the age and its phrases, and with the scenery and costume 
of the biblical narrative, if we may so speak, can after all do 
nothing more, than bring up the possessor of it to a level, 
in point of intelligence and endowments, as a skilful inter- 
preter, with the bigoted Pharisee, who had often heard our 
Saviour himself speak : yet that man, learned as he might 
be in his own national Scriptures, and with all his perfect 



NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 121 

I 

and prompt apprehension as to our Lord's meaning, seeing 
as he did the Saviour's ideas at once, and without the aid 
of glossary or grammar, believed not — heard not aright, and 
in truth knew not the gospel, because of the state of his 
heart, which made him, having eyes, to see not, and, having 
ears, to hear not. And even thus, the man who in our own 
times should pride himself on advantages confessed to be 
inferior to those of the Hebrew doctor, and who, neglectful 
of the state of his heart, would forsooth impose upon all oth- 
ers the interpretation given by his own transcendent schol- 
arship, may well be reminded, that, with all his science and 
with all his talent, he may be as ignorant of the principles 
of Christ's gospel, as was that contented and ignorant Phar- 
isee ; and before allowing him to take, in grave dignity, his 
seat as an ermined and stalled doctor in our schools, we call 
on him to show that he has reached even the attainments of 
those, whom Paul styled " babes in Christ." Let it not 
be supposed that we would decry learning, or underrate its 
value in the study of the Scriptures. We seek now but to 
bring forward the cautionary truth, that the teachings of the 
Spirit are yet more necessary — that they are indispensable. 
Another and varied form in which the same pitiable delu- 
sion, the mere religion of the intellect, displays itself, is in 
the pride of orthodoxy. A man may have succeeded in de- 
vising a correct system of theology, guarded by apposite 
texts, and fenced around with the authority of great names ; 
and may deem the post which he now holds to be the very 
citadel and heart of religious truth : and yet of true piety 
the man may be utterly destitute. The delusion is found 
as well in the hearers as in the teachers of the church ; and 
many, there is cause to fear, content themselves thus with 
the truth dissevered from the love and the life of the truth. 
They hold the verity of the Scripture indeed, but it is not 
the living, and acting, and controlling truth — the laborious, 
self-denying, and heavenly-minded truth, as it is in Jesus, 
received by the installation of Christ himself in the heart, as 
inmate and master of it, and as ruler over the conduct. It 
is the truth preserved as by Egyptian art, heartless and dis- * 
embowelled — a varnished and painted mummy, where are 
the lineaments and the hues of life ; but the warmth, the 
energy, the soul, are fled ; and the true votary of Christ 
finds there no fellow-feeling, and to the out-gushings of his 
sanctified affection " there is no voice, nor any that answer," 

17 



122 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 

and he goes his way saddened from the voiceless and life- 
less image of his Master. With such mistaken apprehen- 
sions of religion, it is possible for us to constitute ourselves 
the very sentinels of orthodoxy, descrying and denouncing 
the first stirrings of heresy, as it peeps and mutters from 
the earth ; while the heart is unhumbled and carnal, our 
devotion is but a burdensome form, and the world reigns 
supreme in our affections. And thus may we, proudly 
standing before the churches, like the scholastic doctors of 
the dark ages, rejoice in the title of the Mallets of Heresy ; 
whilst before God we stand ourselves impeached of hetero- 
doxy as to the first and greatest of the commandments — • 
practical errorists as to the first principles of the Divine Life. 

Into this false form of religion it is but too easy for the 
heedless student to descend; if he do not, according to the 
injunction of Jude, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep him- 
self in the love of God. 

Yet let it not be suggested that studies so rife with dan- 
ger might wisely be omitted. It were easy to show that 
these evils are the growth of a heart which in any situation 
will find the occasions of stumbling, and minister to itself 
sources of temptation in every scene. We might show the 
evils which beset the duty of pastoral visitation, and how 
prone the ambassador of Heaven may there be to sink into 
a mere caterer of frivolous gossip and petty scandal ; — we 
might show the perils of ministerial activity in behalf of the 
benevolent enterprises of the day, and how easily the zeal 
of the pastor thus engaged may sink into a calculating and 
heartless bustle ; — we might discover danger even in the 
course of the pastor, who rejoices in the many conversions 
that attend his ministry, and how the affection of his people 
may become to him the incitement of vanity, and in them 
an idolatrous forgetfulness of the God who prepared the in- 
strument, and gave its whole success — until it would be seen, 
that every work of good, and even the elevations of heart 
found in the closet while communing with God, ministered 
temptation ; and that the man who had been caught up to 
the third heaven, and seen the visions of God, needed the 
buffetings of a thorn in the flesh, lest the visions should un- 
duly exalt him. Yet the peril accompanying those visions 
did not destroy their value. No, knowledge is to be sought, 
although it has its snares ; and religion is to be studied, 
although the student needs to be watchful over his own 



NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 123 

spirit. And how, by the grace of God, scholarship may be 
combined with piety, has been sufficiently shown in the 
former ages of the church. In Owen might be seen an in- 
stance of varied and profound attainments united with the 
most thorough study of his own heart ; and the man who 
moved into the field of polemic theology among the most 
formidable of combatants, with the dust of many libraries 
upon him, is yet found holding communion in his practical 
writings with the heart of the unlettered Christian ; and the 
delighted reader wonders at the vivid and accurate portrait- 
ure of his own feelings, drawn by one whose literary pur- 
suits and whose political activity did not trench on his habits 
of private devotion, or prevent his prayerful examination of 
his own heart and way. In Baxter we see how familiarity 
with the most abstruse researches of metaphysical specula- 
tion may yet consist with eminent devotedness as a pastor 
and surpassing usefulness — and a style which in his practical 
writings speaks to the heart of all classes, as with a burning 
vehemence. Edwards might be quoted as a model of patient 
and profound investigation — the mighty taskings of a mighty 
intellect, united with childlike humility, great holiness, and 
the widest and most enduring usefulness. Of Leighton we 
might speak as exhibiting the union of classical refinement 
and a style of admirable clearness and simplicity with an an- 
gelic elevation and sweetness of sentiment, that seem to throw 
over his pages the very spirit of the Scriptures. And to Pas- 
cal we might refer as a sufficient proof, did he stand alone (and, 
thanks be to God, alone he does not stand), how science, 
and genius, and literature, may become the meek handmaids 
of religion ; and how an intellect of the very highest order, 
and philosophical attainments which, for his age, and under 
the circumstances of their acquirement, lifted him above most 
of our race, may be united to a childlike docility and humility, 
and an earnest and spiritual piety, such as have not often 
blessed the world apart and disconnected, and which combin- 
ed, as they were in him, proved that God did indeed make 
man but a little lower than the angels. And the time would 
fail to tell the lights of our own era — of Henry Martyn, of 
our own Carey, and Hall, and Ryland, and Fuller, and of 
the long and resplendent line of witnesses, whose history 
shows how mind may be tasked and stored, while it is sanc- 
tified ; and how the culture of the heart may keep equal 
pace with that of the intellect. 



124 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 

No — these examples and a vast cloud of like witnesses 
admonish us, that the evils already alluded to are not the 
necessary or inseparable results of knowledge, and that the 
church needs, and may profit by, the culture of the mind in 
her pastors, great as may be the dangers attending that cul- 
ture. 

II. From the future influence, it was said, as well as from 
the present employments of the rising ministry, we might 
infer the need of prayer in their behalf for the outpourings 
of the Spirit. How large an amount of moral power is to 
emanate from the inmates of these walls, eternity alone can 
make manifest. But much has already been done by this 
and similar institutions. And as we see the giant strides 
of our nation in power, and arts, and wealth, and how fast 
her moral needs are outstripping the preparations for her 
moral culture, and how rapidly her villages and settlements 
are outgrowing the largest efforts of the church in their be- 
half, we have reason to pray that the resources of that 
church may be increased. We have cause to pray for the 
men who shall arise to mould and guide the coming age, 
that they may be of high spiritual endowments, and trained 
by habits of devotedness and energy for the great and diffi- 
cult work before them. The young men here taught will 
bear no limited sway among the pastors of the next genera- 
tion. If you would have them men like Samuel Pearce, 
whose holy love shall burn in their memory upon the 
hearts of the churches, you must have them men who, like 
Pearce, shall even in the Theological Seminary be marked 
by eminent prayerfulness. Upon them in part will it de- 
pend, under God, whether the glorious revivals which have 
distinguished this favored nation shall go on, until they have 
overspread and sanctified the land. Upon them, in their 
station, will be suspended the religious welfare, and neces- 
sarily therefore the political well-being, in no small degree, 
of your children — the race that are rising to occupy your 
homes and your sanctuaries. It will be for them to aid in 
determining the question, of such fearful importance and 
now in the course of solution, whether this nation, trained 
for self-government by moral and religious culture, shall 
retain unimpaired the liberty it has inherited ; or, whether 
it shall plunge itself into the most cruel of all slavery, under 
the deaf and bloody despotism of the mob. Their faithful- 
ness will uphold and extend, or tbeir treachery embarrass 



NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 125 

I 

and break up, the great instrumentalities, the moral ma- 
chinery, now at work in this nation for the conversion of 
the world. And while busied in thus caring for distant 
nations, it will be for them to see to it, that our American 
Israel, in going forth against the more remote enemies of 
the Cross, see not, like the men of Ai, as she turns back to 
her own homes, the flames arising from the face of her own 
land, overspread and consuming by the fires of superstition 
or atheism. From within these walls are to go forth a por- 
tion of the needed missionaries to heathen lands, and of the 
translators who shall give to the pagan in his own tongue 
the Book of God. To some of them, as they go forth pub- 
lishing to all the Bible given for all, to the world the Savi- 
our who died for the world, and to all flesh the Spirit that 
is yet to be poured out upon all flesh, it may be reserved to 
win in the perilous onset the honors of an early grave, and 
perhaps of a cruel martyrdom. As in the Pentecostal 
church were seen gathered the representatives of many and 
distant lands, even thus may soon be assembled within these 
walls the representatives, by anticipation, of many a heathen 
tribe — the heralds who shall go forth to regions widely re- 
mote, casting over the broad earth the one band of the gos- 
pel, and knitting around all its tribes the ties of a common 
brotherhood. Certain it is, that the doings and spirit of 
each one here will have an influence for good or for evil on 
myriads through eternity. May God by his Spirit forbid, 
that the influence thus exerted by any one of us should be 
that of the insincere or the loitering ! 

III. Lastly, let us for a moment turn your thoughts to the 
consequent duty of being found earnest in prayer for the 
rising pastors and evangelists of your churches. To qualify 
for duties so vast, and to guard against dangers so many and 
great, what shall avail but the Spirit in its sevenfold energies? 
And if prayer may win the descent of that Spirit, how evi- 
dently is it the duty of all to be found offering it! Of the 
unconverted here shall we ask it. Their cry, alas, is going 
up with fearful accord and constancy, that God and his Spirit 
should depart from us ; for they desire not the knowledge of 
his ways. And your prayer may be heard to your own 
undoing. Neither for ourselves nor for you let it prevail ; 
and would that it were no longer offered. But of those here 
who have hope in Christ, are we not entitled to expect that 
they will not be found wanting? 



126 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 

For the sake of the church, then, we beseech not of min- 
isters alone but of all Christians, their prayers. How great 
is the power upon her happiness, and honor, and increase, 
of an enlightened and spiritual ministry. Alas, what pastor 
shall become such, or continue such, if his brethren sustain 
not his feeble arms by their own hands outstretched heaven- 
wards? The charge of barrenness is by the Christians of 
our own age made to bear too exclusively upon the ministry. 
Know ye not, brethren, that palsied limbs will send back 
chilled and sluggish blood to the heart? You would have 
an efficient ministry — become a praying people. And as 
you value your own growth in grace, and your own instruc- 
tion and comfort ; as you desire the conversion of your chil- 
dren and friends ; as you prize the union, and stability, and 
prosperity, of your churches, be more faithful in the secret 
and devout remembrance of your rising pastors and evange- 
lists. And how lovely and how excellent is a devoted and 
holy church ! Thin its members as you may — take from it 
worldly influence, and wealth, and talent — but leave it bright 
in the lustre of eminent holiness ; and does it not become a 
home to which the heart of the Christian turns with instinc- 
tive and growing affection ? How solemn the rites— how full 
of quiet, unpretending power, the example of such a commu- 
nity — how close the union, and how celestial the peace of 
believers thus distinguished ! And who that has seen such 
a flock " through quiet valleys led," in which the pastor 
moved as a father or brother in the midst of the united family, 
and there was the oneness of interest, the ready and guile- 
less confidence, of some rural homestead, inhabited by a 
numerous and affectionate household, but has felt that he has 
seen the image and the earnest of heaven ? Would, brethren, 
that every church represented in this assembly might become 
such. But a few indolent wishes, a few fervent prayers, a 
few passionate vows, will not effect it. Self-denial, faith, 
love to Christ, forbearance, mutual and persevering prayer 
can, with the blessing of God, effect it. All these are the 
fruits of the Spirit, and for that Spirit as descending on the 
churches of our land, and on their ministry, and on their 
schools of theology, let us pray diligently and habitually. 

Yet another reason for entreating the prayers of the church 
in behalf of her pastors and guides, is that the honor of 
Christ is involved in their character. Paul, in alluding to 
the messengers of the churches, has without hesitation termed 



NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 127 

them w the glory of Christ." The ministers of the gospel, 
trained or training, are the ambassadors of our Saviour. It 
is for the honor of the King and his whole kingdom that 
they be men of Christian skill and integrity — that their 
embassy be successful, and their persons inviolate of the 
enemy. They bear the name, they represent the person, 
and plead the cause of our common Redeemer. For his 
sake, then, and the love of Christ constraining you, pray 
for them. The petition offered in secret may sustain the 
Christian faithfulness, that the flattery presented to your 
pastor or brother would only wound: the infirmity which 
your censures have assailed in vain, may be healed by your 
secret intercessions. And the gain is Christ's. u Inasmuch 
as ye have done it unto one of the least of these," he will 
say, " ye have done it unto me." How delightful would it 
be to discover, in the great day of revelation and retribution, 
that your prayers, unknown of men, but marked by your 
Father who seeth in secret, had given new strength to the 
servants of the cross, nerved their drooping courage, broken 
the edge of difficulty, bedimmed the glare of temptation, 
calmed a throbbing heart, and restored serenity to a troubled 
bosom. Delightful indeed will it be to find, that in your 
closet the impulse had been given which sent new force and 
life into the heart of your pastorship. But far more delight- 
ful will it be, to learn that Christ had thus been honored — 
that through this means new glories had been gathered around 
the brow that is yet to wear the many crowns of earth ; and 
that, instead of wounding your Master in the house of his 
friends, you had been honored to crown him in the persons 
of his ministers. 

And how vast the range of blessing your prayers may take ! 
Who can tell the history or trace the wanderings of yon 
cloud that sails in light and glory across the sky, or indicate 
from what source its bosom was filled with the vapors it is 
yet to shed back upon the earth? Perhaps, though now 
wandering over the tilled field and the peopled village, its 
stores were drawn from some shaded fountain in the deep 
forest, where the eye of man has scarce ever penetrated. 
In silent obscurity that fountain yielded its pittance, and did 
its work of preparing to bless the far-off lands that shall yet 
be glad for it. And even thus it is with the descending 
Spirit. Little do we know often of the secret origin of the 
dews of blessing that descend on the churches of God. In 



128 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH NEEDED, ETC. 

the recesses of some lowly cottage, in the depths of some 
humble heart, may be going on the work of pious interces- 
sion, in answer to which the grace of Heaven descends on 
us and on our children, on the labors of the wondering and 
joyful pastor, and on the hearts of the far heathen, until the 
wilderness and the solitary place are glad for them. The 
time is to come when from every home, brethren, such prayer 
shall arise. Let us sustain and swell, in our day, the as- 
cending volume of supplication that is yet to roll around the 
globe, and never to fail, until over a world regenerated and 
purified the morning stars shall again shout for joy, and the 
earth, emerging from her long and disastrous eclipse of sin 
and wrath, shall yet again walk the heavens in her unsullied 
brightness — a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth 
righteousness. Till then we have no reason, no right, to 
intermit our supplications ; and it is only when, in the final 
accomplishment of David's prayer, his greater Son shall have 
come to reign king over all lands, and to have dominion from 
sea to sea — it is not until that prayer shall have been made 
for him continually, and he shall daily have been praised, that 
the believer remaining on earth will be warranted to adopt 
to his own lips the touching and triumphant close appended 
to the supplications of the crowned Singer of Israel : " The 

PRAYERS OF DAVID THE SON OF JESSE ARE ENDED.'' 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST THE HOME AND 
HOPE OF THE FREE. 

(A Discourse preached at the Recognition of the South Bap. Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., 
July 13, 1845.) 

U STAND FAST, THEREFORE, IN THE LIBERTY WHEREWITH CHRIST HATH 
MADE US FREE, AND BE NOT ENTANGLED AGAIN WITH THE YOKE OF BOND- 
AGE."— Gal. V. 1. 

The Jewish church had been a state of preparation for 
higher privileges and larger illumination, that were, as yet, 
beyond them. Paul elsewhere, therefore, speaks of that dis- 
pensation as being a condition of pupilage, such as the heir 
undergoes during the season of minority, when, though the 
heir, he was treated but as a servant, and was kept in sub- 
jection. The new dispensation ended this, and the burdens 
and bonds of the old ceremonies were then abrogated, and 
the people of God were welcomed into the rights and free- 
dom of adult heirship. But Judaizing teachers wished to 
undo all this. Paul resented it, and protested against it. 
He charged the disciples in the Galatian church, to guard 
with all tenacity, firmness and jealousy, this glorious free- 
dom which Christ had won for them, and conferred upon 
them. It was a gift steeped in the atoning blood of their 
Divine Liberator, a conquest won for them upon the high 
places of the field in Gethsemane and Golgotha. They 
were to be meek indeed ; but their meekness was not to 
show itself in putting their necks passively under a burden, 
which, as Peter himself, the great apostle of the circumcision, 
had said, " Neither our fathers nor we were able to bear."* 
Nor should they, in deference to any teachers, or precedents, 
or traditions, allow themselves to " be entangled again with 
the yoke of bondage." The Church of Christ had, by her 
Sovereign and her Saviour, been made free, and it was but 

* Acts xv. 10. 
18 



130 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 

a proof of due fidelity to her Head, and of due gratitude to 
her Deliverer, that she should remain free. Calvary had 
bought them, not only exemption from the curse of the law, 
as a means of justification, but deliverance from the entire 
ritual of Judaism. We come not, my brethren, into the 
church of the redeemed, as some Jewish Christians in the 
first century contended, as proselytes to the Jew, but as dis- 
ciples to the Nazarene. Our ministers are not the heirs of 
Aaron, nor our ordinances the mere offshoots of Jewish cere- 
monies. The Saviour had, indeed, been the trunk and the 
root of David, in all, even the earliest ages, and in the Pa- 
triarchal as in the Levitical, and in the Levitical as in the 
Christian dispensation ; and when the local, national, and 
transient church of Judaism broke itself off from that stem, 
like a branch broken off from its parent trunk — we of the 
new, the Gentile church, were grafted into its place ; but we 
came to possess privileges it never knew, and to inherit and 
grasp promises which it had only beheld at a vast distance. 
The Jewish church had been grafted into Christ, under the 
restrictions of an infant heirship ; the Christian church are 
grafted into the same Christ, with the liberties of an adult 
heirship. Thus the graft was made a new branch, with new 
twigs shooting from it, and other foliage and other fruit 
than those that had clothed the broken and fallen branch of 
the Jewish church. 

In a land blest, as is ours, with a freedom of which we 
are, perhaps, at times unwisely boastful — having seen, but 
little more than a week since, the anniversary of our nation- 
al independence celebrated through our broad land by one 
storm of joy, and living as we do in an age of democratic 
tendencies, when the rising surges of popular power are swel- 
ling and dashing around the base of the oldest thrones of the 
old world ; it seems not unsuitable or unseasonable to think 
and speak together of Christian liberty, and to remember, 
amid the tumults, and plans, and fears of our times, how 
much the Church of Christ has to do in realizing, diffusing 
and establishing true Freedom. Let us remind others, and 
recall to our own recollection, how little that much used and 
much abused, that idolized and blasphemed name, Liberty, 
is really understood or enjoyed out of the pale of the Church 
of the Living God. 

Let us now consider 

I. The nature of true Freedom. 



THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 131 

II. The Church of Christ as the Home of the Free, where 
alone, Liberty in its highest sense is to be enjoyed. 

III. The Church of Christ as the Hope of the Free, whence 
alone, the ultimate and universal emancipation of the race is 
to proceed. 

When our Saviour spoke of this matter to the Jews, they 
resented it, and replied with more zeal than truth, that they 
had never been in bondage to any man.* It was scarce fit- 
ting language for the men whose national history began with 
the long and hard servitude to Egypt ; whose fathers had 
hung their harps on the willows of Babylon during a tedious 
captivity of seventy years ; who had been peeled and scatter- 
ed by the tyranny of the princes of the royal family of An- 
tiochus ; and who were, at the very hour of uttering the boast, 
licking the dust beneath the kingly feet of Herod, the Idu- 
mean, and fretting and biting, like prisoned wolves, at the 
chain of the Roman, unable to break, and yet most loth to 
bear it. And it is so in our day : men may talk much of 
freedom that are as yet destitute of its best privileges, and 
ignorant of its first principles. What, then, is true free- 
dom 1 

I. Freedom is the absence of all restraint. A mere created 
and dependent being cannot enjoy absolute and unqualified 
freedom, because his finite and dependent nature necessarily 
imposes certain restraints which he cannot surmount or 
escape. Surrounded, again, as we are, by others (our fellow- 
creatures), who all have their rights and wishes as well as 
ourselves, our just freedom consists in the absence of all 
such restraints as are not necessary to prevent our doing 
wrong to the happiness and rights of others of our fellow- 
men. The owner of one of these houses is free to make 
what use he will of his own habitation, that does not render 
it a nuisance and injury to his neighbors. But because he 
is free to use his own property at will, he is not free to set 
it on tire, and thus involve an entire street in the conflagra- 
tion. The passenger in one of the ships lying at our wharves, 
is free to occupy his cabin, and, for the time, it is his castle ; 
but he is not free to scuttle it, and sink his fellow-voyagers 
along with himself. 

Again, we are beings constituted with reason and con- 
science, and our freedom cannot be called rational freedom, 

* John viii. 33. 



132 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 

if employed in contravention of the dictates of right reason , 
or in known disregard of truth, which is to be the standard 
by which reason acts, or in opposition to the warnings of 
conscience, the monitor within us. We are not as much free 
to follow error as to follow truth. We are not free to de- 
fend wrong as well as right. It is putting a violence on our- 
selves, on the nature within us, to make this perverse use of 
our freedom. It is rather the ruin of liberty. It is virtually 
enslaving the soul, to put a force upon right reasor and an 
enlightened conscience, by resisting their dictates. 

Nor is ours a desirable freedom, unless when used to ad- 
vance the happiness both of ourselves and our neighbors. 
The madman left to hack away his limbs, or to destroy his 
own life by plunging from a precipice, or to scatter fire- 
brands, arrows and death upon others, and say, " Am I not 
in sport?"* — and the child, left in uncurbed freedom to its 
own ignorance and waywardness, to glean in our streets and 
lanes a precocious wickedness — neither of them enjoys a lib- 
erty that is desirable, because in both cases the freedom is 
used to ultimate misery instead of happiness. Of a just, ra- 
tional, and desirable freedom, these are then the limits. To 
be truly a good, freedom must be guided by truth as its 
standard, and aim at real happiness as its end. We are not, 
of right, free either to follow falsehood or to speak it. We 
are not truly free to work out our own or another's misery 
and ruin. 

Liberty, it appears then, is really a relative thing. It must 
conform to truth and justice as its rule, and conduce to hap- 
piness as its end. Where is the standard of the truth that 
must guide it, and where the source and measure of the hap- 
piness at which it must aim ? We answer, both are found in 
God. His will, as that will is intimated in creation around 
us, as it is developed in the conscience within us, and as it is 
fully disclosed in the book of revelation before us — this, the 
law and purpose of our Maker, is the one perfect standard of 
truth, and therefore the limit of freedom. His favor is the 
only happiness any of his creatures can know. To seek, to 
learn, to serve, to see, and to adore Him, is the bliss toward 
which all nature struggles as its end, the source of its true 
and abiding felicity. And nought, therefore, is true freedom, 

* Prov. xxvi. 18, 19. 



THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 133 

that does not tend thitherward, because no other freedom con- 
duces to true happiness. 

One who had never known the sorrows of vassalage and 
captivity — in youth free as a shepherd lad, and in age enjoy- 
ing the independence of an absolute prince, yet made the lib- 
erty in which he rejoiced, to consist in subjection to God. 
" And I will walk at liberty," said David ; " for I seek thy 
precepts."* Instead of fettering him, the laws of Jehovah 
constituted the freedom of his soul. Elsewhere, therefore, 
he said, "When thou shalt enlarge my heart, I will run Jie 
way of thy commandments."! The emancipation of the soul 
is shown by its making haste in the path of pious obedience. 

Wishing to be more than dependent and finite creatures, 
and aspiring to be as God, our race lost freedom, when they 
lost also truth and bliss in the fall of Eden. We wished to 
be free from the Creator, dependence on whom was needful 
to our existence and enjoyment, just as if a man should wish 
to make himself free from and independent of his limbs, by 
amputating them, and were to proclaim his independence of 
his eyes by plucking them from their sockets. Creation 
made man dependent on his limbs and eyes, and still more 
did it make man necessarily, inevitably and eternally depen- 
dent on his Creator. Aiming at more than he could of right 
claim, or could by any possibility attain, man lost what he 
already had. His conscience darkened, his passions inflam- 
ed, his reason weakened ; he who had scorned to be the child 
and servant of God became the bondsman of sin and death, 
the child of wrath, the prey of Satan, and the heir of Hell. 
Well is it for mankind that their powers do not equal their as- 
pirations, and that their freedom of action is restrained. Sin 
has, indeed, made this a bad and sorrowful world. But how 
much worse, even than it is, had it been, were it not for God's 
restraints upon our race. The book of history, the record 
of man's acts, is a dark volume. But the book of man's pur- 
poses, of his "imaginations, only evil, and that continually" 
— the pages that will be opened in the day of judgment, the 
dread volume of conscience, and of the hidden workings of 
the heart, is a far darker one. Had no God checked, and 
curbed the race, the world would have been made a mere 
hell, and human kind would have been long since demonized, 
Those unhappy sufferers, plagued and possessed by devils in 

* Ps. cxix. 45. t Ps. cxix. 32. 



134 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 

the times of our Saviour, would have been, not as now, ex- 
ceptions to, but examples of the general rule, as to the char- 
acter and condition, the tempers and the prospects of our 
race. Even as it is, the Destroyer and the Father of lies ex- 
ercises a fearful influence over us. The Scripture represents 
us as his besotted dupes, led captive of him at his will, danc- 
ing to the music of our chains, and in maniacal delusion, 
working out merrily, and with a strong hand and a cheerful 
heart, our own eternal damnation. Such is human freedom, 
as the fall left it. 

But what Eden lost, Calvary recovered. When the strong 
man, armed, kept his goods in peace, blessed be the grace 
and mercy of our God, a stronger than he, the Lord from 
Heaven, came to disabuse us and to dispossess him ; and to 
make us free from the tyranny of that fearful trinity, self, 
earth, and Satan. To know Christ, is to be restored to true 
liberty and happiness, and hence he said, " The truth shall 
make you free." He compared his own work of human 
liberation to the emancipation of a slave by the son and heir. 
"If the son," he said, " make you free, then are ye free in- 
deed." The son and not the steward has the right and the 
power thus to rescue and set at liberty. It was as if he had 
said to the Jews : Moses, in whom ye trust, was but as a 
servant in God's house, and could not emancipate from the 
law ; but I rule that house as son, heir and master. 

2. The worldling is not free. Can he, we appeal to your 
own hearts, in the courts and presence of the heart-searching 
God — can he, who is tossed to and fro by vain fears, and 
hopes as vain, the sport of passions he can neither tame nor 
satisfy — whose conscience is burdened with sin, whose recol- 
lections are haunted by busy remorse — who sees the vanity 
of the world at times, and yet knows nothing better to grat- 
ify the cravings of his heart as it yearns for happiness — who 
dreads death, and yet knows it to be inevitable — who looks 
to the judgment, and feels himself unprepared ; can such a 
man be called free ? No blood of atonement sprinkled over 
his aching conscience — no smile of fatherly favor from the 
throne, breaking through the gloom of affliction, and beam- 
ing over his beclouded and uncertain path — does not all Na- 
ture and all Providence cry out to him, as of old the avenger 
to the criminal : " What hast thou to do with peace ?" Look 
at the vaunting infidel, that boasts of having trampled under 
his feet the vain terrors of revelation and eternity, and who 



THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 135 

arrogates to himself the lofty title of the free thinker — the 
man whose thoughts soar to a more than vulgar freedom, and 
rove with unfettered wing — is he really the freeman he 
claims to be ? Can he always quench conscience and stifle 
fear ? Do his blasphemies annul the law, or annihilate the 
lawgiver and the judge ? Can his delusions fill up the fiery 
pit, or cause the Heaven he derides and neglects to vanish, 
as the baseless fabric of a vision 1 No ; he prides himself in 
a freedom he has not achieved — he has broken, he thinks, 
the thrall and servitude of conscience and Christ, and an 
eternal judgment. But it is all the delusion of a drunken in- 
fatuation — the dream of a sleeping captive, who takes stiong 
drink when ready to perish, and in the visions of the night, 
his prison, fetters, and guards are gone ; and he wakes, and 
behold they are all here again. A fiery gulf envelopes and 
awakes the sleeper, and ends the dream for ever. 

Look at the free-liver, the gay sensualist, the pert trifler, 
the wretched and misnamed daughter of pleasure : surely 
these are free ? Not so. They forget God, but it is only 
for a time, and their misery and their ruin is, that God will 
not, cannot forget them. Wafted amid all their frivolities 
continually onward toward a world of retribution, unable to 
stifle all reflection, and to call up a good hope, they laugh, 
they shout, they scheme, they build, they plant, and God is 
not in all their thoughts : but His eye observes them, His 
hand envelopes their most prolonged and reckless wanderings, 
and His bar gathers them, compels their submission, and 
issues their irrevocable and inevitable sentence. 

3. Yet man is so constituted that freedom he must desire. 
Look at the blind quest and gropings of our race after free- 
dom — liberty or political deliverance for the state, and liberty 
for the soul or mental emancipation. Political and mental 
liberation have been the subject of the most earnest aspira- 
tions, of fierce strugglings, and bloody sacrifices. As be- 
tween man and man, much may have been gained. Far be 
it from us to forget or dispute these temporal blessings, in 
the train of social and spiritual emancipation. But if between 
man and his God, there are instituted no better and happier 
relations, what is the ultimate gain to those who must soon 
quit the world and its governments and schools, to enter 
another and eternal state, where these governments and 
schools are not to be transferred ? If, amid our political 
schemings or our social reforms, we seek not and gain not 



136 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 

the liberty wherewith Christ maketh free, of what avail are 
the brief goods of earth, when we miss the enduring blisg 
of eternity? The science of our times is, indeed, in the 
hands of some of its cultivators, aiming to go further. It 
would emancipate us of our fears and responsibilities. It 
would screw God into the laws of his own material universe, 
shut him up into a sort of blind and dumb, physical, unalter- 
able Fate, and make all events and beings but the blind de- 
velopment of physical, unconscious, unconscientious and irre- 
sponsible laws of being. Pinioned, thus, as in a vice, God has, 
on this theory, no freedom to act, apart from these old mate- 
rial laws. He grows like a tree, and man and history are his 
bark and leaves. Man has thus no individual futurity, and 
no accountability to trouble him, But meanwhile, in strip- 
ping us of our fears, these philosophical emancipators have 
torn from us our hopes. They have made the grave darker 
than it was before their philosophy began its teachings, and 
by annihilating the immortality of the soul, and abolishing 
Providence, they have given us up to the hard servitude of 
appetite, license, mortality and despair. Little is there de- 
sirable in such a freedom as this, that thrusts the race out 
of the immediate and paternal keeping of God, robs them 
of a heaven, and assures them only of a quiet and sleepless 
grave. It is like talking of the blessed freedom of an un- 
fledged, unfeathered nestling, free to be hurled from the pa- 
rent nest, free to flutter and fall to the earth — and unable as 
it is to feed, guide, and defend itself, free there to lie and rot 
into the undistinguished dust. Give us rather the freedom 
of the sheltering home where God cherishes us, the free 
guidance of the outstretched and parental wings fluttering 
over us, and directing our upward way. Give us back from 
the yawning abysses of your vain philosophy, our old con- 
solations, 

* * * Our home, 
Our God, our Heaven, our all. 

Your nominal freedom from Providence is but an insult to 
the intellect and an outrage on the heart. 

II. The Church of Christ is the Home of the Free. 
Here is found the freedom sin has forfeited, and after which 
governments and schools, revolutions and philosophies, have 
groped in vain. 

Now the Christian Church has been, by many, regarded as 



THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 137 

the very den of spiritual tyranny. But as we have already 
and early seen, all desirable freedom resolves itself into that 
which has truth for its standard and happiness for its results. 
Now that gospel, of which the church is the embodiment, and 
the guardian, and the channel, is the great truth requisite to 
meet the wants, solve the doubts, and heal the maladies of 
our nature. It is this gospel that secures our happiness amid 
the trials of time, in the terrors of death, and through the 
long cycles of eternity. But it may be asked, does it not im- 
pose hard, unnatural restraints ? It gives rather new impul- 
ses and aspirations, that fight with the corrupt and degrading 
tendencies of our old and fallen nature. Its restraints are 
the emancipating struggles of a successful rebellion against 
old tyranny, the sacrifices of a glorious war of liberation and 
revolution. 

1. The Church of the Redeemer is, be it remembered, of 
right free, for it is a voluntary association. Christ establish- 
ed it. He enlists as its members " a people made willing in 
the day of His power." Men are not born into it by birth in 
a Christian nation — they are not forced into it by pains and 
penalties, by the fires of the Auto da Fe, and the rack and 
dungeon of the Inquisition. They are not born into it by de- 
scent from a Christian parent, and lineage from a pious 
household. To them that believe on His name He gives 
power to become the sons of God. Belief is an untransfera- 
ble, personal, voluntary act. It is the result of a spiritual 
change, that turns them from the idols of the world, liberates 
them from their old fears and tyranny, and makes them grate- 
ful subjects of their Liberator and Redeemer. To perfect 
this glorious recovery, they put themselves under His care 
and guidance as their Ruler. His presence in the Church, 
and the perpetual influences of the omnipresent and omnipo- 
tent Spirit, which He promised, as the Comforter and Teach- 
er of His Church, make up the very life of the Christian 
Church. 

Much has been said of a visible Church on earth, contain- 
ing the Christians of a nation — or all nations. But in Scrip- 
ture we find but two uses for the word Church. The one de- 
scribes the great Invisible Church, comprising all the saints 
of all dispensations before and since the incarnation, and em- 
braces the whole sacramental host of God's elect on either 
side the stream of death — the dead, the living, and those yet 
unborn. The other, a Visible Church, is described in the 

19 



138 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 

New Testament as a collection of individual disciples, who 
come together in one place for the word and ordinances of 
Christ. Hence the Scriptures do not speak of a national 
Christian Church of Judea, or of Asia Minor, but of the 
Churches of Judea, and the seven Churches of Asia. This 
new and unauthorized notion of a collective visible Church, 
made up of the several congregations of a land or nation, is 
the basis on which rests the assumption of the Roman Cath- 
olic Church. The visible Church of Scripture, and of the 
earliest fathers, is an independent and single congregation of 
disciples. 

As a voluntary association, some may think that the 
Church has power to make its own laws, and may be desert- 
ed at will. But this is not so. He who enters it cheerfully 
does homage to Christ, as the lawgiver of his Church, who 
has completed and closed the statute-book of the body he has 
founded. In professing himself a Christian, he has made a 
contract to which there are three parties — the Church, him- 
self, and the Saviour, as head of the Church. As to his 
power of quitting it, it follows, then, that the congregation he 
joins cannot at will relinquish him ; for if they could release 
their own rights over him, they are not entitled to release 
Christ's rights over his professed and pledged followers. 
Hence it will be seen, that they err who think that they have 
a right at any moment to desert the Church — and that the 
Church ought to permit them to withdraw their names from 
the Church roll, and sink into the world unquestioned and 
unrebuked. It is for Christ to release you. Should he, or 
will he do it ? 

2. Let us look again at the adaptation of the Church to 
promote human happiness. It is a divine invention for the 
diffusion of truth, the culture of piety, and the increase of the 
order and enjoyment of the saints. It is not a nation, but 
something yet more extensive, for it may include the deni- 
zens of every clime ; and yet far more select, for it takes 
none by mere national right ; it is not a family, but some- 
thing more expansive, yet equally tender in its bonds of 
union. It is not a caste, for it despises none, and rejects 
none, yet like the caste it preserves amid human mortality, 
and change, and revolution, a sacred order, not of ministers 
but of saints, all kings and all priests unto God; it is not a 
secret society, for it makes no reserve of its doctrines or 
practices from the world, yet in secret each of its true 



THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 139 

members finds in the communings of his soul with God, the 
sources of a secret and hidden life from heaven. " Your life 
is hidden with Christ in God." Incurring none, then, of the 
drawbacks and defects of the nation, the family, the caste, or 
the secret society — it unites the advantages of them all. 

Those who are spiritually its members by union with Christ 
and the Holy Ghost, are, indeed, freemen ; they are free from 
the dominion of sin, free from the curse of the law, free from 
the bondage of ancient ritual and modern tradition, free from 
the world, and free from Satan. This liberty is not license, for it 
is the just, the rational, the durable freedom that, as we have 
already endeavored to show, is the only one adapted to our na- 
ture and wants. They are not free from Scripture — the Spirit 
living in them does not contradict or neutralize his own ear- 
lier oracles in the written page, because He cannot contradict 
Himself. They are not free from conscience ; it witnesses 
for God, but not as of old and in their unregenerate state, to 
condemn them. Sprinkled now with the appeasing blood of 
the Mercy-seat, it has peace, and preaches grateful homage, 
humility, earnest and constant service to the Divine bringer 
of that peace. They are not free from Christ. They would 
not wish it more than the patriot would wish to be free from 
the bonds of the country he loves, as he loves his own life — 
more than the mother would yearn to be free from the chil- 
dren whom she cherishes as her own soul. They are not 
free from the love of the brethren, nor do they desire it ; this 
brotherly union and alliance is not a restraint or an incum- 
brance, but like wings to the bird,* instead of burdening, it is 
an aid to soar, and a help in their heavenward way. 

3. It is a state of preparation and training for higher 
scenes. They are fitting to become at last members of the 
family of heaven. The employments and services of the 
earthly church are maturing and meetening them for the in- 
heritance of the saints in light. The Sabbath, as it comes, 
bringing its repose from toil, and its respite from eating 
cares, hushing the din, and stopping the noisy wheels of bu- 
siness, reminds them of an endless and unbroken Sabbath 
above. They bring their sorrows to the sanctuary, and to 
their brethren, and to their Elder Brother, and are consoled. 
The snare of the tempter is broken. Age is lightened amid 
its clouds of infirmity, and youth is guided along its steep 

* Bernard. 



140 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 

and slippery way, full of temptations. They look to the 
time of final emancipation, to be free from the flesh, and from 
sin and the tempter. In prayer and the word, and the break- 
ing of bread, and in their alms and efforts, they commune 
with the saints of all classes and climes, with the churches of 
other lands. And the brotherhood of the race, and their 
heirship with angels, come into view as nowhere else, to the 
saints of God, on God's day, and in God's house. 

4. Yet see their freedom, in the relation of these several 
bands of disciples to their own members, to one another, and 
to the governments and states of the world. In themselves 
the several members are all united o the same Christ, and 
although there are different offices aid diversities of gifts and 
graces, authority is not tyranny, and subjection is not servi- 
tude. The Church is not a mere nest of anarchy, nor yet is 
it a scene of spiritual despotism, where a Diotrephes rules in 
the pastorate, or an oligarchy in the deaconship crushes 
pastor and people beneath its iron rod. Amongst their sister 
churches they are related by sympathies and kind offices, but 
own no subjection, and acknowledge no dependence, either 
on cotemporary churches of their own country, or upon the 
churches of other lands or other times, except as those 
churches have held the same truth, cling to the same Head, 
and have imbibed the same spirit. The churches of the con- 
gregational system acknowledge no ecclesiastical -power in 
synods, associations, councils, prelates or pontiffs. 

They claim to hold directly of the ever-living, Almighty, 
and omnipresent Spirit, and to lean, without the interposition 
of chains of succession and lines of spiritual lineage, immedi- 
ately and for themselves, on the bosom and the heart of the 
Saviour, who pledged his presence to the end of the world, 
where two or three are gathered in his name. To all pedi- 
grees of a spiritual and priestly class claimed by some Chris- 
tians, therefore, we oppose the permanent presence and in- 
defeasible priesthood of the great Melchisedec of our profes- 
sion, without beginning of days or end of years ; and we 
claim to " come up out of the wilderness" stayed directly on 
Christ, and " leaning on our beloved." We touch, so to 
speak, his bare arm as our stay, without the intervention of 
the envelopes of any favored order, or virtue running through 
a chain of spiritual conductors. Our graces are not trans- 
mitted, but taken direct from the Redeemer's own hand. 
Nothing short of a personal application to Christ, we suppose, 



THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 141 

will avail us in conversion ; and nothing short of the personal 
presence of Christ will sustain us in the dying hour : and, as 
churches, we judge nothing short of the personal presence of 
the Lord can give energy to our preaching, validity to our 
ordinances, or life to our worship. If we have this, let others 
find, if they can, something better, holier, older, newer, and 
vaster. We know it not, and seek it not. " Where the Spirit 
of the Lord is there is liberty." Each visible church or sin- 
gle congregation is a visible section of the great invisible and 
Catholic church of all ages. 

As to our relations to the state, we suppose that a church 
established by law cannot, in the best sense of the word, be 
free. Whether it be a republic or monarchy, we suppose the 
state to have no prerogatives over the church of the redeem- 
ed. Caesar and Christ have different spheres. Christ paid 
the tribute-money, during his incarnation, as a citizen of the 
Roman state, and a subject of Caesar. But it was not for 
Ccesar to come into the church as a patron or a prince. He 
could not dictate the Sermon on the Mount. It was not for 
Pilate to prompt the parables, or for Herod to originate and 
regulate the miracles of our Saviour, arrange his resurrec- 
tion, or fix the gifts and time, and scene of the Pentecost 
and its effusions of the Holy Ghost. And if the worldly 
ruler could not do these, he has no right as a legislator in the 
Christian church. The only competent legislator for that 
church is the potentate so endowed. Hence, while as citi- 
zens of the state we give, and gladly give tribute to whom 
tribute is due, and fear to whom fear, and honor to whom 
honor, when these limits are past we know no man after the 
flesh. In our own country and denomination, and with our 
social institutions, the intrusions and usurpations of the world 
upon the church are most likely to come in the form of vol- 
untary societies, attempting to control and use the churches 
for their own purposes, and to break them down, and their 
ministers also, when they prove refractory under such at- 
tempted intervention. It is the duty, and the interest of the 
church so invaded, to stand fast, unmoved by the shock of 
the onset, unterrified by denunciations, and unbribed by pop- 
ular interest and favor. Is the voluntary society of man's 
organization, entitled to prescribe to the voluntary society of 
Christ's organization ? W r e question it. To us it seems but 
the old parable of Jotham revived — the thistle, thorny and 
low, undertaking to rule by fire the cedar in Lebanon. Let 



142 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 

us as churches root ourselves in the reserved rights of Christ 
Jesus, and repel all other legislation. 

III. Our last division is the province of the church, in 
diffusing the true freedom of the race. The church of the 
living God is the Hope of the Free. The true lover of lib- 
erty wishes it extended to all. The Head of the church has 
assured to him, from the Father, universal dominion. Far, 
then, as the sun travels over our earth, we expect one day to 
see the Sun of Righteousness diffusing his beams and swath- 
ing the globe with the brightness of his light as with a gar- 
ment of glory. Wherever the rain falls or the dew gathers, 
we look one day to behold the early and the latter rain of 
the Holy Ghost diffusing its showers, and converting the 
arid wilderness into the garden of the Lord. 

1. We look, then, in estimating the future emancipatory 
influence of the church, to what it has done. Receiving a 
free gospel, and having been commanded what it had freely 
received freely to give, it has preached to the poor, the ne- 
glected, and the destitute. In our times it is preached by the 
new engine of the press. The Word of God which, as the 
incarcerated apostle rejoiced in his times to say, "is not 
bound," has by the press, as the missionary has employed it, 
been unbound and set loose in strange dialects, till the lan- 
guages most generally spoken by our race have now all the 
Bible in versions of their own. And Christians have largely 
scattered them. From the gospel, as preached by some of 
its most consistent adherents, has sprung the chief political 
freedom of our times. Even Hume saw in the Puritans, 
whose religious and political principles he alike hated, the 
conservators of English freedom. And American freedom is, 
in a great measure, the harvest, sprung from seed sown by 
the Puritan and Pilgrim Fathers of New England. As to 
intellectual emancipation in the form of education, the best 
common school systems of the old and new world have been 
formed and matured by the Protestantism of the several 
countries, where such schools are found. Most of our col- 
leges are traceable to the Church of Christ. The American 
Revolution triumphed, because a pure religious faith had 
prepared the way, by training a people disposed and capaci- 
tated for freedom. The first French Revolution failed, be- 
cause it had no such basis to rest upon ; and the second 
French Revolution, that of our own times, failing to find 
permanency on an infidel basis, is seeking a religious support, 



THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 143 

by reviving and patronizing the once decaying Romanism of 
France. 

Such are the forms of freedom, the freedom of literature, 
government, and education, man most desires and exults in ; 
and for all how much has the church done. But there is a 
higher style of emancipation. The souls freed and saved, 
and ushered into heaven — these more glorious trophies of 
the gospel — who can calculate or follow, as, free from the 
chains of sin and Satan, and from the low dungeons of earth, 
the Liberator and Redeemer has led them in, to the rest, the 
triumphs, the harpings, and the endless freedom of the heav- 
enly world ? 

2. But from what the church has done, let us look, in 
estimating its prospective power, to what it would do. It 
seeks the universal illumination, and emancipation, and evan- 
gelization of the race. Its prayer is, Thy kingdom come ; 
and the Messiah's kingdom is but another name for the lib- 
erty wherewith Christ maketh free. It would banish war 
and bondage, and intemperance, and ignorance, and oppres- 
sion — all that can degrade, all that can exasperate, divide, or 
brutify the race. The truth it would universally diffuse ; 
and freedom, as we have seen, leans on truth. Happiness it 
does not believe in as being rightfully a matter of monopoly. 
" Freely ye have received, freely give," is the motto of all 
its spiritual enjoyments. Grace is their name, as coming 
from Divine benignity — Grace, as commiserating all human 
misery. Its blessedness is enhanced by being diffused. Each 
new heir of heavenly joy fills the courts of the upper world 
with new melody, and awakens a new anthem from the 
seraphim and cherubim that circle the throne of light. A 
religion thus vast and expansive in its hopes, and plans, and 
prayers, is the religion likely to attempt what the race needs. 

3. But does it accomplish what it attempts ? This brings 
us to our last remark. We have seen what the church has 
done, and what she would fain do. Let us now inquire, in 
conclusion, what she can do ? She can do what nothing else 
can. 

(1.) The freedom of the gospel, we observe, in the first 
place is necessary ; for it alone has the power to make other 
and inferior forms of freedom possible. When the Church of 
Christ would go forth to evangelize the savage in the last cen- 
tury, philosophy stepped between the relief and the wretch- 
edness, parting the barbarian and his benefactor, to tell the 



144 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 

Missionary that he could not evangelize until the savage had 
been first civilized ; and that civilization must always precede 
the gospel. The Missionary thus rebuked, was not repelled. 
He went on. The result has shown the folly of this inter- 
meddling and braggart philosophy. Instead of the gospel re- 
quiring civilization as a pioneer, it was civilization that could 
not go on till the gospel had prepared its way. It was the 
gospel that had made civilization possible. By awakening a 
soul within him, and revealing a heaven and *~ell before him, 
the savage was aroused to discern other and inferior wants, 
and civil culture travelled in the train of Christian truth — 
and where the Bible, and the Missionary, and the Sunday 
School, had gone, the common school, constitutional law, art 
and domestic comfort travelled after. But a similar feeling, 
unhappily, prevails as to other social ameliorations. It is 
said to the gospel and the church, " Stand back until educa- 
tion, until a better system of relief for the poor, enfranchise- 
ment for the slave, and democratic insurrections, prepare 
your way." Our reply is, " Let the world stand back for the 
church, and the church sta?id fast in the vanguard, where it 
has a right to be." It is the Bible and the church, and the 
Spirit of God, that must make most of these social ameliora- 
tions possible. Here, as elsewhere, the policy of the nation, 
as Christ has made it the policy of the individual, is to seek 
first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these 
things shall be added* Get a man or a nation converted, and 
all else needful will come in its time. But an irreligious and 
godless nation cannot be permanently free, cultivated, order- 
ly, or happy. 

There are blessings of the highest worth, which religion 
can give to the world as no other influence can give them : 
and yet the Church of Christ cannot bestow them directly 
without swerving from her appointed course, and endanger- 
ing her own purity. She blesses the world with national 
wealth and household comfort, but it is indirectly by the in- 
dustry and thrift she teaches. If she sought to accumulate 
wealth, in her corporate character, or made riches a term of 
her membership, she would become the slave of Mammon, 
and laying up her treasures on earth, be, on the instant, dis- 
owned of Christ. She gives the world political emancipa- 
tion ; but it is indirectly, for if she directly mingled herself 
up with the work of organizing one form of government, 
and subverting another, she would be false to her supreme 



THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 145 

allegiance to Christ, by making his kingdom tributary to the 
republics and potentates of this world. She is to advance in 
the world the cause of illumination and universal education. 
But this, too, is done indirectly. If she did it directly, and 
converted her pulpit into a mere desk of philosophy, and 
made admission into her membership and ministry dependent 
upon a certain amount of literary culture, she would not only 
wrong the Holy Ghost, but retard ultimately, and in the most 
important quarters, the very work of spiritual enfranchise- 
ment for the race, that she would be scheming to aid. It is 
the genius of her system, the law of her organization, to push 
God's claims first, and let man's rights follow ; to aim at 
heaven, and bless earth by the way ; to fasten one hand on 
those skies where her King is throned, and her own crown is 
reserved, whilst from the other she flings around as inferior 
gifts, the earthly and indirect benefits of her influence, just 
as a king, on the day of his coronation, scatters among the 
crowd on his way gifts of price, but his own eye is on the 
diadem and the throne. 

(2.) The Church of God is needed again, for it alone can 
make other freedom valuable. Leave the heart under the 
bondage of selfishness and depravity, and the science and the 
freedom of earth cannot wash the Ethiop white, or make any 
change of circumstances heal the private and social miseries 
of the times. There may be political freedom, and art, and 
knowledge, where there is no piety found, but amid them 
all, man will groan, like Solomon, exclaiming, amid his 
wealth, while his heart ached under the royal purple, and his 
head throbbed under the kingly diadem : " Vanity of vanities 
and vexation of spirit." With a conscience that cannot be 
calmed, and passions that cannot be subdued — with the foot 
in the grave, and the hand stretching forth into an unknown 
eternity, and groping in uncertainty to find some clue to 
life and hope beyond the tomb — can man be blest until the 
church of the living God has reached, disenthralled, enlight- 
ened, and gladdened him % What is political equality to a 
dying sinner, and what your own Declaration of Indepen- 
dence to a soul, that, burdened with its sins, and ignorant of 
the Cross of Christ, asks in dismay, " How can man be just 
with God ?" " If a man die shall he live again ?" No ; the 
church must make all other and earthly blessings worth hav- 
ing. The blood of Calvary must drop into the cup of worldly 
freedom, or that freedom even is a bitter draught. 

20 



146 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 

(3.) Lastly, we say, the Bible and the Church, and the 
Spirit of God only, can give enduring freedom. Intelligent 
and observing statesmen have begun to see that bad men 
may rebel, but cannot be free. There are certain blessings, 
that, if given, cannot be kept, unless there be a certain state 
of preparation for them, a good soil in which they may be 
planted. Solomon's vines, the fruit whereof was to bring a 
thousand pieces of silver, would not thrive if planted on the 
sea-shore, and flooded by the salt tide. So freedom, to 
endure, must have its substratum of moral culture to sustain 
it, and its showers of Divine grace to develop it, or else 
it takes no permanent root, and brings forth no perfect fruit. 
Establish to-day universal equality and universal suffrage, an 
agrarian division of property, and universal education ; and 
men's weakness, their difference of years, inequality of 
strength, and talents, and influence, would re-establish dis- 
cord and inequality to-morrow. Self-government is the basis 
of all abiding liberal governments, and who, but the Chris- 
tian, has learned to govern himself in truth ? Brotherly love 
is the only intelligible and practical form of social equality ; 
and a pure Christianity has the secret of this. Christianity 
is the true citizenship of the world ; and universal peace, and 
the free exchange by all lands and tribes of their several pe- 
culiar goods and gifts, are possible only as all are grouped 
around, and united by the Cross of a common Redeemer, 
and the hope of a common heaven. 

1. We live, my brethren, in eventful times. If ever the 
cry needed to go forth, distinctly and repeatedly, over all the 
battalions of the sacramental host, " Stand fast in your lib- 
erty as Christ gave it," it is in our times. There are theo- 
ries many of social change, and nostrums many of social 
relief, that undervalue the church, decry the ministry, and 
slight the paramount claims of the Bible. But regeneration 
and personal conversion are the only remedy for man's great 
misery. The church is God's organization, for the true dis- 
enthralment of the world. Betray it not, improve it not, by 
the admixture of human arts and inventions. Surrender it 
riot to the philosopher ; nor let the statesman subsidize it. If, 
as some think, the death-grapple of truth and error is not far 
oil', it is the church, simple, spiritual, and divine, the body of 
Christ, the temple of the Holy Ghost, that is to be the invinci- 
ble and infrangible battalion, the Immortal Legion, in the im- 
pending conflict. Out of it, we see her coming, "Fair as the 



THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 147 

sun, clear as the moon, and terrible as an army with ban- 
ners." In the strifes and storms of the times the ship of the 
state may labor and break. Unduly lengthened, some fear, 
that the Union may part amidships. But the ship of the 
church cannot founder. Her Lord, the Almighty One, is 
embarked in her. 

2. The grand, the vital question^* all remains. Am I 
free ? It is not whether I be a proressor of religion. But 
have I felt the power of the gospel to subdue sin, cancel 
guilt, and breathe peace ? Does it give me filial freedom be- 
fore God, and fraternal freedom before man ? 

" He is a freeman, whom the truth makes free, 
And all are slaves beside." 

If the slave of Satan, how little can I, the prayerless and 
the God-hating, and the God-forsaken, be an available bar- 
rier to my country against the tide of evil influences that 
would flood her. I need God's freedom to give and sustain 
effectually the human and social liberty I prize. 

Am I freed by the grace of Christ Jesus, then am I free 
to pray — to enter with holy boldness and a filial frankness 
into the most holy place. The Bible charges the wicked 
with enlarging their desires as hell. Surely, it is the strength 
and honor of the Christian to enlarge his desires as heaven — • 
to ask according to the breadth of the promises, and the 
greatness of the great King, at whose feet he is a petitioner. 
" He that spared not his own Son, but gave him up for us 
all, how shall he not with him freely give us all things ?" 
Thus encouraged, seek blessings for the race, for your coun- 
try, your city and yourself, in God's order ; salvation the 
greatest first, and all else the lesser benefits in its train. 
" Seek first the kingdom of God," and then expect that, ul- 
timately, under its emancipating, enlightening, and peaceful 
influences, the earth will become the suburbs of heaven. 
The knowledge and freedom of the upper world will drop 
down upon this lower world ; and man will breathe even in 
time the spirit of the freedom of eternity, and anticipate the 
joys of that city, described by the same apostle in this same 
epistle, as the Jerusalem which is from above, which is free , 
" which is the mother of us all."* 

* Gal. iv. 26. 



THE STRONG STi^F AND THE BEAUTIFUL HOD. 

(A Discourse preached in the Amity St. Bap. Church, April 12, 1840, on occasion of the death of 
TIMOTHY R. GREEN, ESQ.) 

C( HOW IS THE STRONG STAFF BROKEN, AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD !" 

Jer. xlviii. 17. 

These words were first spoken of Moab. But the imagery 
they contain is used in Scripture to describe the benefactors 
as well as the oppressors of mankind. The staff is the em- 
blem of power, whether employed in kindness or in tyranny, 
to support or to crush. The rod, shooting out of the earth 
with its buds clustering thickly upon it, seems the image that 
nature would instinctively select as the fitting emblem of 
promise and hope. The surrounding nations, in the fall of 
Moab, saw with astonishment that sceptre of power on 
which they had long looked with awe, shattered, and the rod 
of beauty cut down. And still, in his Providence, God 
calls us to look with mournful surprise upon those on whom 
many leaned, and from whom much was hoped — the young, 
the beloved, and the useful, laid low in the dust. We had 
counted upon their long life, we had deemed them too much 
needed to the best interests of the world and the church, to 
be early removed — we had expected their influence to ex- 
tend and strengthen itself with the slow lapse of time, and 
when we allowed ourselves to think of their death, we put 
far off the evil day, and thought of them only as going down 
to the grave in a good old age, laden with blessings and full 
of honors and usefulness. But, ere we are aware, their 
course is ended, in the full flush of their strength and of our 
own hopes. Their sun goes down while it is yet noon. 

The dispensation to which our remarks at this time will 
have reference, seems a mysterious one. We mourn, but 
it is in submission. We are not forbidden to weep, for 
Christ himself wept at the grave of his friend. But we are 
forbidden to sorrow as those who are without hope, and our 



THE STRONG STAFF AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 149 

mourning must be without murmuring. The event is one 
that has saddened many hearts, and blighted the richest 
promises of general usefulness to society, and the fairest 
prospects of domestic happiness. We see a Christian widely 
known, and as generally beloved, crowned with blossoming 
hopes and clustering fruits, struck down into the dust, in the 
strength of his years. We see, on the other hand, thousands 
spared to old age, who seem to nourish in flaunting, peren- 
nial barrenness, from whom society receives no good, and 
who are the mere cumberers of the earth. Such scenes are 
strange, yet they are not new. They were seen by the 
prophets in their times, they drew tears from the eyes of de- 
vout men in the days of the apostles. The Church of Christ 
in the earliest ages must have wondered to see James, one 
of the brothers whom Christ had hailed as the Sons of Thun- 
der, falling in the very commencement of his career, while 
they beheld Simon the Sorcerer remaining to be the curse 
and snare of thousands. The devout men who carried Ste- 
phen to his burial and made great lamentation over him, 
must have had their sorrow mixed with no little perplexity, 
when they looked at the bruised corpse of the zealous and 
youthful evangelist, and, thinking of his untimely fate, turned 
to Annas, the high-priest. They must have found their 
faith tried as they asked, why the youthful preacher fell and 
the hoary -headed persecutor was allowed to survive ? Yet 
God did it. He ruled then and He rules now. This was 
their consolation, and it must be ours. We would remem- 
ber this, and be comforted. And may th,e God of all wis- 
dom and of all consolation touch the lips of the speaker and 
the heart of each hearer, as, standing beside this open grave, 
we ask in reverence — 

I. The purposes of our Heavenly Father in such bereave- 
ments. 

II. The duties to which we are at such seasons called. 

I. There is much that we know not now, and that can 
never be known in this world ; but this we know assuredly, 
that God does not willingly grieve or afflict us. Reluc- 
tantly does he wound us, and only because it is indispensable 
to our sanctification, and our sanctification is indispensable 
to our happiness. 

1. And one great and known purpose of our Heavenly 
Father in such overwhelming bereavements is, to teach us 
that we should not misplace our trust. Man from his 



150 THE STRONG STAFF 

weakness must necessarily have, without and beyond himself, 
objects on which to rely and confide. But it is his misery 
and his sin, that he forgets the true object of trust, and leans 
for support on helpers that must fail him in the hour of trial. 
Men confiding in their fellow-mortals, are but like vines, 
entwined around each other, and which thence lie rotting on 
the earth, when they should rather with their tendrils climb 
the sides of the Rock of Ages. We expect, all of us, from 
earth what earth cannot give. We lean on the reed — it is 
shattered in our grasp and pierces the hand that clasped it. 
The disappointments and perplexities of earth are embittered 
by our expecting constancy and permanent aid and lasting 
sympathy from man — from man, the mortal, the being of 
yesterday, whom to-morrow hides in the tomb — from man, 
the fickle, whose purposes change, often and greatly, even 
in the course of his brief life — from man, the feeble, whose 
power is limited even where his kindness may continue un- 
abated. This dislocation of our faith, this misplaced trust, 
is the mystery of the world's ruin. What but this misplaced 
reliance is it that makes up the false religions of the world ? 
One idolizes his own reason, and therefore pours contempt 
on the Creative intellect, because it rises to a height which 
his tiny glasses cannot bring within their sweep, or sinks 
into depths which his scanty lines and plummets cannot 
fathom. Another trusts in tradition because he dares not 
trust in the unguarded Scripture. Antichrist himself builds 
his fearful system on this simple basis — a transfer of confi- 
dence from Christ J:o the Church — from the Redeemer to the 
redeemed — from the Sinless to the sinful — from the Infalli- 
ble to the fallible — from God to man. Instead of finding the 
One only Saviour, men are taught to go in quest of the one 
only Church. The Church rather than the Christ, is to 
ensure their salvation, and protect them from all possibility 
of error. The superstitious and the sceptical, the idolater 
and the Atheist all agree, widely as their paths may after- 
wards diverge, in leaving the way of Truth at this one point 
- — they trust in " the creature more than in the Creator." 
And doing this, they inherit the curse of the God they for- 
sake ; for " cursed is the man that trusteth in man and 
maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the 
Lord.*" And what is the process of the sinner's conversion 



* J cr. xvii. 5. 






AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 151 

but the retracing of his course back to this fatal step, and 
returning at this point to the way of truth, and making the 
transfer of his confidence back again from self and earth to 
one Saviour and God ? The turning point of our eternal 
destiny is found in the object on which we rely. Faith and 
unbelief are the poles on which the eternal world revolves. 
Yet, even when God has brought us to renounce alt earthly 
confidences, and to make Him, the High God, our Refuge 
and our Portion, the heart is continually prone to relapse. 
The Church of God is but too ready to prize unduly the 
helpers of her faith whom God has raised up ;' and to guard 
us from the consequences of an error so fatal, the Holy One 
of Israel breaks the rods in whose beauty we delighted, and 
causes the props on which we have leaned to crumble be- 
neath us. And this misplaced confidence in earthly friends 
is found but too compatible with a neglect rightly to employ 
the blessings we so value. The king of Israel could neglect 
that prophet in his life-time, over whose death-bed he cried 
in passionate despair, " My father, my father, the chariot 
of Israel and the horsemen thereof." He could weep over 
the expiring prophet, as if in his death the God of Israel had 
perished, and the fall of that one man had thrown to the 
earth all the bulwarks of the land ; and yet he had disre- 
garded that holy seer of the Lord in the days of his health 
and strength, and given little heed to his instructions. Thus 
it is, that we contrive at once to undervalue the blessing, as 
to any actual use made of it ; and to overvalue it, in our 
expectations of the advantages it is to ensure us. 

2. Another great and avowed design of our Heavenly 
Father in such dispensations, is, to convince us of our sins, 
and sever us from them. The misplaced confidence already 
shown to be so habitually our feeling, is itself a sin ; but it 
is not the only sin thus visited. All transgression requires 
some mark of the displeasure of the God against whose law 
it offends, and the beauty, harmony and happiness of whose 
universe it mars. Sin, the act of man and his invention, has 
caused all the misery that darkens our world. The hand 
that plucked from the tree in Eden the forbidden fruit, aided, 
by that act, in tearing up every goodly plant of hope and 
every scion of promise and enjoyment, over whose fall man- 
kind have since wept. Each bereavement that makes our 
homes desolate and puts out the light of our tabernacles, and 
that clothes our sanctuaries with mourning — each funeral 



152 THE STRONG STAFF 

threading its slow way through our busy streets, and each 
sandy ridge in our crowded church-yards, eloquently reminds 
us of sin. It was through that gate of sin, which man's own 
rash hand forced open, that the Avenger Death entered the 
world, and Eden became a place of graves, and the Paradise 
of God, once redolent with undying beauty and glittering in 
perennial life, became what the sin of Israel in the wilder- 
ness made the scene of their enjoyments to them, a Kibroth 
Hattaavah. It is thus that God checks not only our per- 
sonal but our social transgressions. Paul declares that many 
amongst the Corinthian believers slept the sleep of death, 
because of the sins that infested that branch of the Christian 
Church. And we, my dear friends, as a Church, have 
doubtless deserved at God's hands this sore and bitter be- 
reavement. Let us feel it, and ask wherefore God has so 
heavily afflicted us? Let us "be zealous and repent." 
With a holy indignation let us examine ourselves for the 
traitor sins that have provoked this chastisement, and, if 
God's purpose be answered in thus divorcing us from our 
idols, even this calamity shall work for our good. 

3. A further end that the Providence of God seems to 
pursue in such visitations, is the teaching us His own inde- 
pendence of the instruments He employs. It seems to us 
unaccountable, that after having endowed with every gift 
and grace thpse whom He has raised up to be the benefactors 
of their age, He should scatter and dissipate His own gifts 
and hide the treasures He has thus accumulated, as a dark 
and unused hoard, in the grave. After having chosen his 
servants, conducted the process of their education, and quali- 
fied them by trials and lessons and privileges for the work in 
which death surprised them, He interrupts them often at the 
very season when they seem most useful, and when their 
continuance has appeared indispensable to the interests of 
the family gathered around them, or the churches with whom 
they walked. We wonder that a Martyn, a Summerfield 
and a Pearce are but shown to the churches, and then with- 
drawn. Now, if we do not so far sin, as to put our trust in 
these our friends, but our confidence is really in God alone, 
we may yet limit too much the Holy One of Israel. We 
may suppose that He is able to bless us only through certain 
favorite channels. To show his own independence, and 
that " He will send by whom He will send," God may sum- 
mon hence his most useful servants by what seems an 



AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 153 

untimely call, that, in the language of Paul, " the excellency 
of the power might be seen to be of God, and not of men." 
The Sovereign of the Universe must not appear even to re- 
semble those earthly monarchs whose aggrandizement is 
owing more to the skill of their statesmen and the conduct 
of their generals, than to their own policy or prowess. It 
was in part, perhaps, for such reasons, that, in bringing the 
chosen tribes to the Land of Promise, God determined to 
bury their leaders in the way. Had these entered Canaan 
at the head of the tribes, Israel might have thought that their 
God could bless them only through the instrumentality of 
Moses, Aaron, and Miriam ; nor had they then asked or 
received their Joshuas and their Deborahs, the Samuel and 
the David that adorned their later annals. And how skill- 
fully does God contrive to show his independence of all his 
instruments. He withdraws, one by one, each individual 
thread in the warp and in the woof of human society. It is 
removed, and its place supplied by another, and yet the 
whole web remains unbroken. Amid perpetual change, the 
scheme of human society and the plan of the Divine govern- 
ment moves on in unbroken continuity. 

4. And even were we able to trace to no other purpose the 
origin of the affliction that has bowed us in the dust, we know 
that there is one errand it was undoubtedly intended to accom- 
plish. It came to remind us of the Sovereignty of God. 
This is a truth which even the most pious are apt to forget. 
We fail to remember that God is the Great Proprietor of the 
Universe, and that we ourselves, and our friends, our health 
and life, and all that we have, and all that we are, belong to 
Him, as the possessions which He may arrange and remove 
at his pleasure. We do not wish to be called to account by 
a stranger for the use of what is our own, and we can ex- 
claim at such intermeddling, " Is it not mine own? Is thine 
eye evil because I am good?" And should not God be allowed 
the same right ? And there are dispensations of Providence, 
the great errand of which seems to be, to leave on our hearts 
the impression, " God giveth no account of any of his mat- 
ters."* We wonder and we suffer ; but we feel, that 
although " clouds and darkness are round about Him, yet 
righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne. "f 
" His path is in the great waters, "| and we cannot trace it. 

* Job xxxiii. 13. t Psalm xcvii. 2. t Psalm lxxvii. 19. 

21 



154 THE STRONG STAFF 

But though in those waters our earthly hopes be wrecked — « 
though the son, the brother and the friend may be buried in 
their abysses — though " deep calleth unto deep," and all 
" his waves and his billows go over us," we know assuredly, 
that He who moves amid that storm is Just, and the foot- 
steps which we cannot follow are those of a Father, moving 
in a right way towards his own glorious purpose. And this 
lesson itself, were it the only one, is worth all it costs. To 
know that God rules, that He is supreme, is, to every mind 
which feels aright, consolation under any trial, and a reply 
to all murmurings. Each bereavement is but the act of One 
who gave all that we now lose, and who is but resuming his 
own boon. If He try our faith as he did that of Abraham, 
by asking our Isaacs, let us remember that He takes but to 
restore — that the " brother " whom we lose " shall rise 
again at the resurrection in the last day " — and above all, 
let us reflect, that the God who asks such sacrifices from us, 
has made a greater sacrifice for us, when He gave his own 
Son, a sacrifice for a world of sinners. When the Isaac of 
the Heavenly Father was bound, there was no angel crying 
from heaven to avert the descending knife, no ram caught in 
the thickets became a substitute for that costly victim. And 
having so loved us as to give His own Son to become the 
propitiation for our sins, may we not freely surrender to his 
disposal each lesser good? 

5. But it is not His mere power that He would have us 
remember. We may discern traces in such dispensations 
also of His wise and watchful benevolence. There are per- 
haps designs of the richest mercy to the surviving Israel of 
God, in making, at times, the removal of a Christian from 
earth most unexpected ; — sudden as may be the shock thus 
produced, and wide as may be the chasm created by the be- 
reavement. It is adding to the happiness of Heaven, which 
has long comprised the larger portion of the Church Univer- 
sal, and it is, by adding to the attractions of that, " the Gen- 
eral Assembly and Church of the first-born " above, exciting 
the upward aspirations, lessening the temptations, and loos- 
ening the bonds of the Church yet militant upon earta. 
" I go," said the Saviour, when about to quit the earth — 
"I go to prepare a place for you." His creative word could 
have framed in the highest heavens all that was needed, 
whilst He himself should have remained still on the earth. 
Scenes of surpassing magnificence and beauty would have 



AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 155 

started into existence at his bare command ; nor was His 
personal return to heaven needed, to lay the foundations of 
the New Jerusalem, and to set up its gates of pearl. But 
the Church of Christ was at death to pass within the vail 
into an untried state, and its very obscurity clothed it with 
an awful and repulsive aspect. The assurance that a Friend 
of infinite tenderness and equal power, ever living and ever 
faithful, was already there, would disperse much of this 
dread. And amid all their uncertainty as to the scenes and 
employments of the heavenly world, they thus knew some- 
thing of its society. The fact that Christ was there was 
enough to make it a better land, inviting to the heart, meet- 
ing their largest hopes, and quelling all their fears. But He 
has yet other modes of rendering Heaven less an object of 
apprehension and more one of desire. Each one of those 
known to us whom He has removed thither becomes a new 
incentive to seek that blessed city, and a new evidence of 
its spiritual opulence. When we have known a departed 
Christian merely from his biography, or by his written labors, 
he becomes often so endeared to us, and we so interested in 
his character, that the thought of meeting him and pursuing 
the acquaintance thus formed with him adds new lustre to 
our conception of the heavenly state. We close the memoirs 
of a Halyburton, a Martyn, or a Payson, or the burning pages 
of a Baxter or a Leighton, and feel as if we had lost a per- 
sonal friend, when the grave closes upon their earthly ca- 
reer, and we long to see their history resumed, and to behold 
their character yet more fully and beauteously developed in 
the state beyond the grave. But if converse with a man's 
works and memoirs makes him thus ours, and we wish to 
trace and regain our lost friend in his removal to other 
spheres of existence, much more must we feel this for the 
brother with whom we have taken sweet counsel, and with 
whom we have gone up to the house of God in company, 
whose voice has led in our devotions, who has aided us by 
advice and kindness, and made our hearts glad by the ten- 
derness and sympathy of friendship. The loss of such a 
Christian friend and kinsman is a wise provision of the Elder 
Brother to prepare the heavenly home for the travellers that 
yet linger on their way through the wilderness. It makes 
heaven more attractive and more familiar, and every such 
death is adding to the spiritual furniture of the Father's 
house of many mansions, enriching it with inmates whose 2 



156 THE STRONG STAFF 

fellowship we would fain regain, and whose example comes 
to us recommended by affection and hallowed by death. 
And may we not say without irreverence, that each one 
thus departing uses to us the language of his dying Redeem- 
er ; "1 go to prepare a place for you ?" The tendencies of 
earth and sense are most strong to make the visible and the 
invisible world too distant from each other, cutting off all 
sympathy by the impassable barriers of the tomb. But by 
such removals God makes our affections bridge the chasm, 
and fling to the earth all intervening barriers. Our bonds of 
attachment and confidence grow over the yawning gulf, and 
shoot onward into the unseen and eternal world. We feel that, 
divided as we may be, the church is yet one ; and that the 
stream of death destroys not the unity of the Israel of Gocl. 
The bands that are yet occupying the nearer shores, and the 
larger and happier host that have passed over the swellings 
of Jordan and are now set down in the city of endless rest, 
are really one. One banner — one Captain — one inheritance 
prove their indivisibility. And every friend who has reached 
the farther shore becomes a helper of our faith, not only in 
the example left behind, by his earthly career, but also in the 
incentive supplied by that higher and more lasting career of 
existence on which he has now entered, and in which he is 
looking for us to share. 

And the more sudden the removal, the less that the be- 
reavement has been expected, the more closely does God 
seem to bring into visible union the two divisions of His 
sacramental host. When the Christian dies after a lingering 
illness that had long been regarded as fatal, or sinks slowly 
into the grave beneath the burden of old age, we feel as if 
"the space between the state of the righteous in this world 
and that of their disembodied brethren were more like a vast 
and immeasurable interval. It seems as if the long period 
of their sickness and declining age was needed to carry them 
over the wide chasm intervening between the world of active 
life here on earth, and the world of rest there. But when 
death snatches them from our sides with the heat of the 
day yet moistening their brows, and the burden of the day 
yet bowing their shoulders, and they are hurried at once 
into that world of repose, the separation between the world 
of the senses and the world of spirits seems, as it actually is, 
most slight. We feel that our daily steps take hold upon eter- 
nity, and that the earthly church should at every moment be 



AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 157 

ready to migrate to the fellowship of the church above. 
Viewed under its ordinary aspects, the waters of death to- 
wards which our feet are tending seem a dark ocean, stretching 
away into the shoreless distance. But the loss of the young 
and vigorous, smitten down at our sides in the midst of their 
tasks, narrows the stream. The eye glances across to the 
farther shores, and we seem to catch glimpses of the unut- 
terable glories, and to hear the harpings of the innumerable 
company of harpers before the throne. We know that he 
who has disappeared from our view has made his entrance 
into that assembly, and our thoughts are carried, in his rapid 
transit, with unwonted ease to the new scenes he inhabits ; 
and the heart of the survivor almost forgets to bleed, when 
thus wafted suddenly into that land where the hand of an 
Almighty Father staunches not only the wounds but even 
the tears of his suffering people. Were every death linger- 
ing and long expected, the heavenly world would seem more 
distant than it actually is. But the sudden translation of 
the believer makes us feel its nearness. We think no more 
of the change as Ihe voyage of many weary days ; but feel 
how easily the Redeemer may accomplish the promise to 
bring the soul this day to be with him in Paradise. 

II. Such are some of the lessons that the God of Provi- 
dence would have us learn ; let us remember also the duties 
to which we are, amid such scenes, specially called. These 
are submission, improvement and confidence in God. 

1. In the light cast by the word of God upon these His 
dispensations, we are to exercise submission. He does not 
call us to apathy. He expressly warns us against despising 
the chastening of the Lord, and to display a frigid insensi- 
bility were to despise and to defy His chastenings. But yet 
we are not to faint when rebuked of Him. We are, in our 
weeping, assured that Christ himself can sympathize, and 
that the Ruler of the universe has not forgotten that He was 
once the Man of Sorrows. But we may not in selfish grief 
refuse to be comforted. Remembering. our many mercies, 
blessing God that what we have lost was so rich a blessing, 
and was so long continued to us, counting up our transgres- 
sions, and feeling how little proportion the severest chas- 
tisement has yet borne to our unworthiness, we shall see 
that submission is our evident duty. But while the intellect 
and the conscience may yield their prompt acquiescence to 
the dealings of our God, the affections may again and again 



158 THE STRONG STAFF 

renew the contest. It was thus with Job. When the trials 
that were appointed him came fast and heavily, he at first 
charged not God foolishly, accepted the chastisement, and 
justified the chastiser, and both in his language and his 
conduct under the first onset of his calamities " he sinned 
not." But although his judgment was thus convinced, his 
feelings soon rebelled. He rashly challenged God to ap- 
pear in controversy with him and justify His severe dispen- 
sations. Yet at last, through the influences of the Spirit, the 
murmurer was silenced and the mourner comforted ; and 
the apostle, when alluding to that remarkable history, be- 
seeches us to remember " the end of the Lord," and that He 
was proved by the issue even of those severe and multiplied 
afflictions, "very pitiful and of tender mercy." 

'2. Another duty which God demands from all who share 
in scenes of mourning like the present, is our personal im- 
provement, and that we profit by the example of those who 
have " died in the Lord." The testimony given by our 
friend was the eloquent testimony of a life of Christian con- 
sistency. I feel that, in attempting to sketch the character 
of a beloved friend, I may be suspected of overcharging the 
picture. But I would remember that the place I here occupy 
is that of the minister of Christ's gospel, and that not the 
partial eulogy of man, but the truth in its severe simplicity 
is all that is permitted by the Master to whom I stand or fall. 
We know, too, that our departed brother would have rejected 
all praise that placed him before others in any other light 
than that in which he had long rejoiced to stand before God, 
as a penitent sinner saved by grace. But that grace was in 
him so winningly manifested — there was in him so much to 
love, and so much to admire, that it seems due to the glory • 
of the grace of God which made him what he was, that he be 
not left to sink unnoticed into the grave. The unexpected 
removal of his father, who embarked from a southern port 
in a vessel from which no tidings were ever received, left 
him, as the eldest son of his widowed mother, to be from an 
early age the hope of the family. He was often told by his 
surviving parent, at this early age, how much depended on 
his bearing and conduct. We have more than once heard 
him alluding to this, and describing the strong influence it 
had exercised on his feelings and character. He felt that 
there were required of him forethought and considerateness 
more than are generally found at his years. The natural 



AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 159 

sobriety of his temperament, and his innate dignity of de- 
meanor, became in consequence more strongly developed, 
perhaps, than they would otherwise have been. His classi- 
cal studies were pursued under the direction of Daniel H. 
Barnes, that most enthusiastic and successful teacher, whose 
respect and esteem he secured in a remarkable degree, and 
of whose delicate kindness he always preserved a grateful 
remembrance. His collegiate course he completed with 
honor in Columbia College. On leaving it he selected for 
his profession that which had been also the employment of 
his father, the law. He had been but little more than a year 
engaged in its study when his attention was drawn to the 
subject of religion. He had thought of the gospel as some- 
thing which befitted rather the other sex, but which would 
be inimical to that manliness of character which from an 
early period it had been his ambition to cultivate. The 
work of that most patient and profound reasoner, Butler, on 
the Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion, taught him 
that in neglecting Christianity, he had been contemning what 
he had not understood. In the study of the scriptures, and 
in earnest and secret prayer, he was brought, as he trusted, 
out of the darkness of nature into the glorious light of the 
gospel, and was made to rejoice in the hope of the children 
of God. Some difficulty made in the Baptist Church to 
which he first offered himself for membership, because of the 
sentiments which he held as to the atonement of Christ being 
made for the whole world, prevented his union there. His 
views of religious truth were those generally called Calvin- 
istic, although he did* not, with many who would claim ex- 
clusively that designation, regard the sacrifice of Christ as 
being in its original provision made only for those who are 
finally saved by its effects. A delay of some months, if not 
years intervened, during which he studied the Scriptures, 
and the views of several evangelical denominations. 

Shortly before or after the completion of his legal studies, 
in the years of opening manhood, he made a public profes- 
sion of religion in connexion with the Oliver Street Baptist 
Church in this city. In the formation of the Amity Street 
Church, an offset from that, he took an early and active 
part. How great his usefulness to us as a people, the value 
of his counsels, influence, and example, and of his personal 
labors in the Sabbath School, of which from its establishment 
lie was the beloved and indefatigable Superintendent, I need 



160 THE STRONG STAFF 

not say to those who already know it so well, and feel so 
deeply the loss we have endured by his removal. 

In his professional career and in his influence on society 
he seemed marked for distinction and great usefulness. 
Averse from principle and the habitual dignity of his charac- 
ter to all that chicanery which has more generally than justly 
been ascribed to the members of the bar, he won universal 
respect and*confidence. Well read in his profession, known 
to a very extended circle of acquaintances, and universally 
esteemed, the blended dignity and courtesy of his manners, 
his assiduous devotion to business, and his strong, sound 
intellect, seemed to promise him the honors and emoluments 
of his profession in liberal measure. His attention to his 
legal studies did not cramp his mind, or lead him to shun all 
other reading. With great refinement of taste and delicacy 
of feeling, and a judgment of remarkable maturity and ripe- 
ness, there was an unvarying propriety that ran through his 
actions. The same traits made him an adviser of great value. 
Imagination, though richly stored with classic and beautiful 
imagery, was not with him an active faculty. His judgment 
had too overbearing a preponderance to allow to the fancy 
its full scope. Hence, though he could clothe any sentiment 
with appropriate and graceful illustrations, they were rather 
the acquisitions won by reading than the play of his own 
imagination. His intellect was eminently a practical one, 
and he showed great skill in seizing on two or three of the 
strong points of any question, and placing these in a clear 
light, he left the lesser details comparatively to care for them- 
selves. Yet, though practical, his mind was not like that 
of many practical men, narrowed and distorted by looking 
merely at a few obvious and common facts entirely apart 
from their principles, thus neglecting those general truths 
which must ultimately sway the course of every mind pos- 
sessed of any power. He rose invariably and of choice to 
the contemplation of principles, but in the application of 
them he allowed quite as invariably for the actual state of 
things in the world around him. In temper he displayed the 
greatest calmness and sweetness, and united happily great 
frankness of bearing with much caution. The reserve some- 
times imputed to his manners was rather the result of his 
signal prudence, and of a refined taste that shrunk alike from 
display on his own part and coarseness on the part of others, 
than of any coldness of feeling, i'or in the free intercourse 



AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 161 

of friendship none ever bore a warmer, kinder heart. In 
the retirement of home, how considerate, how amiable, how 
estimable and exemplary he was, they only can tell aright, 
who feel that in the brother, the son and the husband, they 
have been bereaved of one whose loss can never be replaced. 
A more devoted son no widowed mother ever leaned upon 
in the hour of trial, and the testimony of all who have ob- 
served him nearly, and most the testimony of those " the 
light of whose tabernacle " God " has put out " in this be- 
reavement, would prove how few have ever been so richly 
endowed with those qualities that shed around the little 
world of home the serene, unbroken sunshine of cheerfulness 
and affection. 

But it is chiefly with his religious character that we have 
here to do. And religion in him was a principle so con- 
stantly influencing his course, suffused over his whole cha- 
racter, no where gathered in unseemly blotches, but shedding 
every where the hues and bloom of spiritual life, that it must 
have attracted the notice of all who have known him. No 
man dreaded or disliked more all appearance of ostentation, 
or the least semblance of cant. His was a practical religion, 
uniform, steady and noiseless as the light of day. His busi- 
ness habits, and the peculiar ripeness of judgment already 
mentioned, made him in the boards of the Amer. Bible Soci- 
ety, the American Tract Society, and the American Sunday 
School Union, an adviser greatly valued and relied upon. 
Of the Young Men's Bible Society of this city he had been 
an efficient member for nearly the whole period of his Chris- 
tian profession, and he was at the time of his death its Presi- 
dent. When leading in the prayers of the conference room, 
there was a devout and subdued earnestness that gave to his 
prayers a peculiar character, and compelled all to feel when 
he conducted their supplications, that he was entering into 
the presence of a God whom he adored whilst he loved. 
Reverence and humility seemed breathing in the tones of 
his voice, while his language was tinged with that rich, an- 
tique simplicity of which our English Bible is so beautiful a 
specimen. Alas, that we shall hear that voice no more ! In 
the concerns of this church how discriminating a mind he 
ever showed, and with how steady a hand he held the balance 
in which he weighed and conciliated opposing opinions, many 
here have remarked with admiration, and they will long 
remember with deep regret the irretrievable loss we have 



162 THE STRONG STAFF 

endured in his departure. Though from conviction and 
study he preferred the denomination to which he belonged, 
his feelings were eminently catholic. He showed it in all 
his intercourse with Christians known by other names. It 
was manifest in his reading. He could relish true piety, 
whether found in its seraphic fire in the Lectures of Leigh- 
ton, or in the prayers, tinged with superstition as they are, 
of Bishop Andrews, in the memoirs of Halyburton, a book 
which he prized highly for its close anatomy of the heart, in 
the history of that most devout and able body of men, the 
Port Royalists, or in the story of the missionary toils of some 
of the earlier and purer Jesuits. The refinement and polish 
of his manners, his intelligence and cheerfulness, won him 
the respect even of the worldly, without betraying him into 
any sacrifice of principle, or unworthy concealment of his 
Christian character. 

Such he was ; and we had hoped for many years to have 
rejoiced in his light and been strengthened by his counsel. 
But God saw fit to order otherwise. A derangement of the 
digestive system, under which he had long labored, became 
more severe in the autumn of last year. His whole consti- 
tution seemed greatly enfeebled. But neither his friends 
nor himself apprehended danger. At the commencement 
of the present year he suddenly determined on a voyage to 
the South, hoping for benefit chiefly from the voyage, and 
most confidently expecting to return to his professional en- 
gagements and to his friends here after the lapse of some four 
weeks. The voyage instead of alleviating seemed to exas- 
perate his disorder, and left him among his friends at the 
South so greatly exhausted that he was compelled to aban- 
don all thoughts of an immediate return. The friends to 
whose home he was most kindly and tenderly welcomed, 
feared far more as to the issue of his disorder than he him- 
self had yet learned to do. Anticipations of possible danger 
did probably pass across his mind, but these seem to have 
been brief and at long intervals. Yet many circumstances 
combine to show that the retirement of the sick-room was 
employed in the review of his life and the close scrutiny of 
his heart. Members of his family from New York, alarmed 
and distressed at the unexpected tidings of his growing 
weakness, set out to join him at the South. She who is 
now his afflicted widow, and his sister, were permitted to 
reach him a week or more before his death. Two other 



AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 163 

members of the family arrived but four days before the clos- 
ing scene. Yet to the last they and he could not but cling 
to the hope of recovery, persuaded as were his physicians 
that there was no disorder other than a derangement of the 
digestive system, and that the chief danger was from the ex- 
treme feebleness produced by his inability to receive nourish- 
ment. To Mrs. Green, before she was willing to admit those 
anticipations of his probable departure to which he some- 
times adverted, he remarked that he had been looking at the 
character of God, and it appeared awfully pure and holy, 
" and that was right ;" he looked then at himself, and he was 
unholy, and the contrast distressed him. Though his course 
had been in the eyes of his friends one of singular consis- 
tency, and his character as a disciple of Christ had been pre- 
served in the eyes of the world unblemished, he yet said in 
the course of another conversation, " that the world had 
doubtless seen much in him to disapprove, but they had not 
seen his deep and secret repentings." Language of this 
kind from one whose course had been marked by such beau- 
tiful moral symmetry, showed how deep and spiritual were 
his views of religion. And although from an anxiety to 
avoid distressing his friends, and the expectation he himself 
habitually cherished of being permitted at least to return to 
his home in this city, he did not constantly speak of death 
as being near, there were yet times when his language showed 
that he was looking forward to it as an event that was not 
improbable, and that might not be very remote. But still, 
with all this, the last summons came suddenly. Being 
asked on the last day of his life, when scarce able to speak, 
if he found the Saviour near, and if he could in his strength 
enter eternity, he replied with a voice so low as to be well 
nigh inaudible, " He is here." The expression still more 
faintly uttered some little time after, " I am dying" was the 
last intelligible language that was gathered from his lips. 
But when he had lost the power of speech, he was still sen- 
sible, and as the promises of Scripture were recited in his 
hearing, and he was asked if he found his mind peaceful and 
calm in the prospect of the change before him, to signify it 
by closing and then opening his eyes, he was seen, as they 
who stood by the death-bed were watching him with intent 
anxiety, to close and open them, and then closing them a 
second time to open them again, while he fixed on his wife 
a look of unspeakable benignity. His lips were seen moving 



164 THE STRONG STAFF 

as if in prayer, and his eyes were cast heavenward. Life 
went out gradually, and it was difficult to fix the time of his 
dismission. His death-bed was peace. There were no rap- 
tures. The state of his body, attenuated as it was and en- 
feebled to the utmost, exercised its usual influence on his 
mind. But there was, amid all, peace. He had said, ten days 
before, to Mrs. Green at a time when she was unprepared 
to believe his danger so imminent, and when he himself at 
times cherished strong hopes of recovery, that the 16th of 
March was his birth-day, and it might prove the day of his 
death. And such it was — the day of his emancipation from 
earth, and his birth-day, we humbly trust, into the glory and 
bliss of the heavenly world. 

He received from the unwearied kindness of the relatives 
at whose residence he expired, most assiduous and devoted 
attentions. He enjoyed the visits and conversations of pious 
friends from the vicinity, and amongst others of the Rev. 
Mr. McGill, a Presbyterian clergyman, who also officiated 
at his funeral services. Several of his family were permitted 
to reach his dying couch. Yet with all these alleviations, 
and they were many and merciful, it seemed a melancholy 
comment on the uncertainty of all human calculations, that 
he who went to pay the visit of a fortnight, remained to die, 
away from home, and far from some of his nearest kindred. 
It seemed mysterious that one so beloved and so useful, so 
needful to the general interests of religion amongst us, and 
so indispensable to the family who leaned on him in confiding 
affection, should be removed so unexpectedly. Yet we know 
that it was ordered by Infinite kindness and unerring wis- 
dom. We trust that our departed brother knew this, and 
that he found the sentiment which he quoted to a pious vis- 
itor in the last days of his life, the habitual language of his 
heart : " I will remember the years of the right hand of the 
Most High." 

We think of what he was, and we think of what he prom- 
ised yet to become ; and it seems difficult to acquiesce in the 
dispensation. Yet He who has done it, loved him more truly 
and tenderly than we could ever do. He made him what he 
was upon earth, and has now, we doubt not, made him a far 
happier and holier being in the world of light than he was or 
could ever become upon our dark earth. Let us not then 
mourn him selfishly in wishing that our gain might be se- 
cured by his loss — restoring him to earth by depriving him 



AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 165 

of heaven ; — let us not mourn him sullenly, in chiding with 
the Father who gave and who has taken him ; but let us 
mourn him meekly and wisely, by treading in his steps, and 
following him even as he followed Christ, and thus hastening 
forward to the reunions of Heaven by a growing meetness 
for its employments. Were he here again he would see 
much doubtless to be amended in his own course — he would 
perhaps discern, high and consistent as was his career, how 
worldly ambition had yet dimmed at times the clear vision 
of his faith ; and the interests of time usurped more than 
their share of thought and labor, in comparison w,th the in- 
terests of eternity. Let us mourn him, by living not only as 
he lived, but as he would live were his career to be again 
commenced. 

Especially is the example of such a man valuable in this 
day of . contest and agitation. Calm and reflecting, with a 
coolness of judgment that ever guided the movements of a 
warm heart, he was not to be swept away at the mercy of 
every current. His actions, the result of principle, rather 
than of blind impulse, had a serene steadiness. You knew 
where to find him. He had not to wait until he could com- 
pile his creed from the huzzas of the multitude. In the calm 
light of conscience and truth he studied his duty, and in the 
broad day-light he did it. 

3. It is the voice of each bereavement like the present that 
we cease from man and put our trust in the Lord Jehovah, 
in whom is everlasting strength. 

The young men here present see in the character of our 
departed brother the effects of such a faith. They are taught 
by a noble example how much a young man may accomplish, 
how strong the confidence and how profound the respect that 
may be won even for that age which is generally looked 
upon rather for exertion than counsel, for glowing impulses, 
than for the lights of wisdom and meditation. And how 
rich is the legacy bequeathed by such a Christian to his 
fatherless child and his mourning relatives, compared with 
the legacy many a young man leaves, of a tarnished name 
and wasted powers and a lost life. His was not a lost life. 
Many of his plans were left incomplete, and his plough was 
checked by death, and stood still in the middle of the furrow, 
but it was rightly aimed, and well had it been driven, and he 
looked not back. 

This bereaved Church are called to confide in God. Our 



166 THE STRONG STAFF 

lamented brother was one of the colony originally constitut- 
ing this Church ; and in all the counsels, labors and sacri- 
fices necessary to its establishment, he has borne an active 
part. He was greatly and deservedly beloved. In the 
Sabbath School he united, in a singular degree, the power 
of securing the respect, with that of conciliating the affections 
of the children. He was absent from us. We hoped for 
his return. We hear of his death. Others of our number 
have been cut down in the promise and strength of opening 
manhood. Let us as a people turn to Him that has siLitten 
us, and by the united and augmented efforts of many aim to 
supply the loss of one — but that one so variously endowed 
and so greatly useful. And although we may scarce in the 
usual course of God's providence expect to see again his 
like, for it is not the ordinary dealing of God to bestow two 
such men upon a church in one generation, yet trusting Him 
and serving Him, He will not fail us. Let us emulate his 
piety, not intermittent and occasional flashes, but a broad, 
serene and steady light. And if his loss but bring nearer to 
us the eternity he has entered, and the Saviour and the 
Spirit, to whose influences he owed all, even this bereave- 
ment shall be for our good. 

To the bereaved family where should I find language to 
address myself or arguments for consolation, could I not bid 
them also trust in God? How wide a chasm has one death 
occasioned, from the mother who has seen the son that was 
for years her stay, suddenly removed, to the child yet un- 
conscious of the vast loss he has endured, and the widow 
whose brimming cup of happiness God has dashed to the 
earth. If I sought to point you to earthly topics of consola- 
tion, how mean and petty would these worldly consolations 
seem. But in the remembrance that he whom you have lost 
is now, we have good and joyful hope, with God — in the 
hope given to so many of you, that you are journeying to 
the same city of habitation, and that death is the gate of a 
blissful and endless reunion to those who " die in the Lord" 
— there are thoughts that may brighten even such a scene. 
When a pious visitor asked our dying friend for what he 
should pray, his answer was, " Sanctification." And if this 
be your prayer for yourselves, and for those who as yet 
know not the God of your friend and brother — if we all that 
loved and lament him could but be persuaded to bury in his 
grave all worldliness and indifference, how glorious and 



AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 167 

salutary the fruits that would spring even from this bitter be- 
reavement. And although Nature will, even in the heirs of 
promise, murmur at a trial like the present, yet, the anchor 
of the promise, my beloved friends, has not torn itself loose 
even amid this storm ; and this, even this calamity shall work 
together for good to them that love God and that trust Him. 
The ark may be tossed, but through all the wild and sicken- 
ing commotion it shall swing, heavily indeed, but safely, its 
way towards the haven of rest. We see, in every death, 
God's truth as executing his threats pronounced in Eden. 
Let the fulfillment of the curse teach us that the same truth 
is pledged to the accomplishment of the promise. 

To the Sabbath school teacher I would say, Trust more 
entirely in God. Remember how sudden may be your 
transfer from the class and the teachers' meeting to the pre- 
sence of the Judge and the scenes of your rest. You leave 
the school-room, perhaps, as it was left by your beloved 
superintendent, all unconscious that your eye is casting its 
last glance on the walls, and your feet crossing the threshold 
never to return. Oh, the light that such events let in upon 
old and familiar truths ! How, by the grave of one thus 
smitten down in the strength of manhood, do we see the true 
purpose of life, the worth of the soul, the majesty of the 
gospel, the glories of a Saviour, and the tremendous import 
of that word— Eternity. 

To us all it remains, as the one duty, the first and the last 
of each of our fallen race, to renounce our trust in the crea- 
ture for a simple and grateful trust in the Creator. It is 
affecting to observe how they who have tried Him most 
closely have attested his unshaken stability. David and 
Moses, both men of large experience in the most active and 
diversified scenes of life, are found in their last hours extol- 
ling God under this one aspect — the Rock. They had found 
man as treacherous as he is feeble, and earth full of change, 
and uncertainty, and instability. The one had heard his 
own followers speak of stoning him at Ziklag ; and the other 
had caught the shoutings of idolatry from the tribes, chosen, 
and led, and fed by miracles, at the foot of the burning Si- 
nai ; and even his meekness had given way on hearing the 
contentions of the people at Meribah. The one had felt 
the murmurings of Miriam, and borne the envy of Korah. 
The other had encountered the enmity of Saul, the malice 
of Doeg, the craft of Ahithophel, the treachery of Absalom, 



168 THE STRONG STAFF AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 

and the cursings of Shimei. Pleasure, and wealth, and 
honor had offered their aid to ensure happiness, and to estab- 
lish security : but from them all these men returned, declar- 
ing that God is the Rock. Prove Him, then, ye sinners. 
For He stands, amid all the changes of the world, the Endless 
and the Immutable One. The strong sceptre which His hand 
grasps is not shattered, and the Rod of the Stem of Jesse is 
yet to rule all nations, and to fill the world with its fruit. There 
was an hour when it was grasped and splintered in the fierce 
onset of hell. That was the hour and power of darkness. 
But, buried in the earth, that Rod blossomed from the dust, 
and sprung up, a Shoot of Hope for all the earth — the Plant 
of Renown and of Life to all the nations. Believe in Him, 
and your reliance shall never fail. Neglect Him, and not 
all the prosperity He may permit, or that earth can bestow, 
will be to you other than a bruised reed. The time is com- 
ing when it shall fail you — when even pious friends, and 
godly parents, and Bibles, and sanctuaries shall not save you. 
How wretched, then, will be your lot compared with that of 
the man, who, looking round on the dark valley, can also 
look upward and say, " I will fear no evil, Thy rod and Thy 
staff they shall comfort me." Grasping that staff, the parting 
spirit can say to an avenging law, an opening grave and a 
flaming hell, "He is here" — He, the Propitiation, the 
Redeemer and the Resurrection. And if enabled to say this 
truly of ourselves, we have the pledge of Christ's presence 
wherever we wander. If called to take the wings of the 
morning, and to travel to the furthest shores of the universe ; 
if, tempting an untried way, we pass through scenes the most 
perilous, this shall remove all loneliness and ensure all hap- 
piness, that everywhere the sinless spirit can say still, " He 
is Acre," reposing securely in His Omnipresence, and resting 
content in His All-sufficiency. 



THE JESUITS, AS A MISSIONARY ORDER * 

The missionary spirit contributed to the discovery of our 
continent. " The man who gave to Castile and Leon a New 
World," was full of high religious aspirations. With much 
of the superstition, Columbus had more than the piety of his 
age. He regarded himself as commissioned by a higher 
than any earthly court, in the great enterprise which he pur- 
sued with such calm constancy. On reaching the shores he 
had long sought, his first act was to kneel in devout thanks- 
giving. If his chroniclers have truly reported his prayer, 
he blessed the God who had deigned to use his humble ser- 
vice in preparing the way that his own sacred name might 
be preached in this new portion of his universe. And in his 
last will, he charges it upon his son to maintain divines who 
should be employed in striving to make Christians of the 
natives, declaring this a work in which " no expense should 
be thought too great.'' 9 

Little knew Columbus of the trains of religious influence 
that came in the wake of his great discovery. In those weary 
days and nights of anxiety and watchfulness, when his soli- 
tary courage buffeted, single-handed, the mutinous remon- 
strances of his companions — when, with such difficulty, he 
kept the prow of his vessel turned still toward the West — if 
he understood little the peculiar aspect of the shores he was 
fast nearing, he knew quite as little of the mysterious instru- 
mentality, already provided in the Old World, to grasp and 
shape the New Continent as it emerged from its concealment 
of ages in the recesses of ocean. Had he been asked, on 



* This article was originally prepared as an address before the Society of 
Missionary Inquiry in Brown University, before whom it was delivered at 
their anniversary on the evening of Tuesday, Sept. 3, 1839. A separate pub- 
lication was intended, in pursuance of the request of the Society. Various 
causes have prevented its receiving the additions and changes it was once 
the writer's wish to have made, and have delayed its appearance to the 
present time.— Note in Christian Review, Boston, 1841, p. 165, 

23 



170 THE JESUITS, 

that morning of triumph when his eyes first beheld, green, 
bright and fragrant, the shores of the new-found world, who 
would be the instruments of its conversion to the true God, 
how blindly would he have answered ! For its religious in- 
structors, he would have looked to the universities of the 
Spain that had patronized him, or of the England or the 
France that had neglected him ; or he would have turned his 
eyes to his own native Italy. But we, to whose gaze have 
been revealed those leaves in the volume of Providence that 
no mortal eye had then read, have learned to look elsewhere 
for the religious guides already training for the new-found 
hemisphere. Standing in fancy by the side of the great 
Genoese navigator, we look back over the intervening waste 
of waters to the Old World. But our eyes turn not to the 
points that attract his gaze. Ours wander in quest of Eise- 
nach, a petty town in Western Germany. In the band of 
school-boys that go from door to door through its streets, 
singing their hymns, and looking for their dole of daily bread, 
we catch sight of the full, ruddy face of a lad now some nine 
years old. Those cheerful features bear the mingling im- 
press of broad humor, vigorous sense, good-nature the most 
genial, and a will somewhat of the sternest. The youth is 
the son of an humble miner. His father has sent him hither, 
some three years ago, that the boy may be taught Latin, and 
receive such help as poor scholars in Germany thought it no 
shame to ask. That lad is Martin Luther ; a name soon to 
ring through either hemisphere, the antagonist of the papacy, 
the translator of the Scriptures, and the instrument of a 
spiritual revolution, that is to impress its own character, not 
on Northern Europe only, but also on the larger half of that 
continent, of whose discovery that school-boy will soon be 
told, as he bends over his grammar or bounds through the 
play-ground. And here have we found one of the master- 
spirits, that is to fix the religious destiny of the New World. 
We look yet again for the rival mind, that is to contest 
with Luther's the honor of fashioning American character 
and history. Our next glance is at Spain, that country from 
whose ports had been fitted out the little armament that is 
riding on the sea before us. But it is not to its brilliant 
court, or to its universities, then famous throughout Europe, 
that we look for this other mind, that is to aid in casting the 
spiritual horoscope of our continent. On the northern shores 
oi the country, in the province of Biscay, and under the 



AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 171 

shadow of the Pyrenees, stands an old baronial castle, ten- 
anted by a Spanish gentleman of ancient and noble lineage. 
In the family of eleven children that gladdens his hearth, 
the youngest born, the Benjamin of the household, is now a 
child of some two years old. That tottering infant, as he 
grows up to manhood, will at first mistake his destiny. 
Smitten with the chivalrous spirit, that hangs as an atmos- 
phere of romance over the Spain of that age, he will become 
a courtly knight, delighting in feats of arms, and not free 
from the soldier's vices. But his ultimate history will be of 
far different cast. Wounded at the siege of Pampeluna, his 
shattered limb will confine him to a couch, where his waking 
hours will be spent in reading the legends of saints, and from 
that couch of pain he will rise an altered man. For this 
prattling child is Ignatius Loyola. This baby hand is yet 
to pen the " Spiritual Exercises," that far-famed volume, 
which still remains the manual of the Jesuit order, the book 
that has swayed so many a strong intellect for this life and 
the next, and shaken some minds even to insanity. He is 
to become the founder of a religious fraternity, who shall be 
the Janizaries of the Romish church, its stoutest champions 
against the Reformation, and its most daring emissaries 
around the globe. Neither Luther nor Loyola ever visited 
our shores, yet no two of the contemporary minds of Eu- 
rope so signally controlled the religious history of this con- 
tinent ; and both were in their boyhood, the one at a Ger- 
man grammar-school, the other romping in the nursery of 
an old Spanish castle, when Columbus planted his foot on 
the shores of St. Salvador. 

The institution, which Loyola created, early wrapped 
itself about the history of our country ; fathers of the Jesuit 
order having, both in the northern and southern portions of 
the continent, borne a large share in the work of discovery 
and civilization. Had the efforts of France been but crowned 
with answering success, this body of men had given their 
own religious hue to our territory. Seven years before 
Plymouth Rock received the disembarking colonists from 
the May-Flower, and twenty-three before Rhode Island had 
its first European settlers, " France and the Roman religion 
had established themselves in Maine. "* Still sooner, Jesu- 
its were in Nova Scotia, and in 1625, Jesuit missionaries 

i. , - , i 1 

* Bancroft, vol. I., p. 28. 



172 THE JESUITS, 

were laboring on the banks of the St. Lawrence. The early 
governors of New France were zealous patrons of such mis- 
sions, and that Champlain, whose name is yet borne by one 
of our lakes, declared that the salvation of one soul is worth 
more than the conquest of an empire, and that the object of 
a Christian king, in extending his dominion over an idola- 
trous country, should be only to subdue its inhabitants to 
the sway of Jesus Christ.* Not on the course of the St. 
Lawrence only, but in the remote depths of our wilderness, 
and on the shores of our great western lakes, the Jesuits had 
early planted their missions and gathered their converts 
from the Huron, the Algonquin, the Iroquois, the Illinois, 
and other tribes of Indians. 

It has been the boast of the order, that Providence made 
the birth of their own Ignatius Loyola to coincide so nearly 
with that of Luther, by the same arrangement of divine be- 
nevolence that is said ever to provide the antidote in the 
vicinity of the poison. Their writers are also accustomed 
to say, that in bringing so closely together the rise of their 
founder and the discoveries of Columbus, God had evidently 
pointed their way to those missionary labors upon our con- 
tinent, in which they engaged so early and successfully. f 
Well may the Protestant, and especially the citizen of these 
United States, bless in his turn that fatherly care of divine 
Providence, which neither allowed the era of American col- 
onization to be hastened, nor that of the Reformation to be 
deferred. Had these events been differently arranged — had 
Spanish blood and not English flowed in the veins of our 
first settlers — or had the May-Flower borne to our shores 
the foundations of a Catholic colony, and had our own Roger 
Williams been a Jesuit missionary — or had the schemes of 
French conquest, that would have made Canada but the 
starting-point of North American empire, been successful, 
how different had been the annals, not of this State alone, 
but of the whole country, and in truth of our entire race. 
America had wanted her Washington. The impulse of mod- 
ern revolutions had remained yet to be given, the name of 
Lexington had continued still a common and unhonored 
sound, and the dial of the world had been put back far more 
than the ten degrees, by which at the prayer of Hezekiah 
the sun went down on the dial of Ahaz. 

* Carncs, p. 3G8. t Charlevoix, Histoire dc Paraguay. 



AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 173 

The Jesuits, as a missionary order, furnish then a theme 
in which we have a national interest ; and the subject may 
well employ for a passing hour the thoughts of an assembly 
of American Christians. Odious as the society justly became 
for its acts and its crimes, it had its purer era, when its 
emissaries were men, not only of singular talent, but of 
burning zeal, and in some cases even of true piety. If it 
has had its Escobars, it has also been honored by its Xa- 
viers, its Riccis, and its Nobregas. Nor is it just, in de- 
nouncing its shameless casuistry, its mendacious miracles, 
its remorseless ambition, and its crooked policy, to overlook 
the usefulness, or deny the virtues that have adorned some 
among the sons of Loyola. Its eight hundred martyrs prove 
that its zeal has been of no ordinary kind. Man is but too 
prone to pour over the checkered good and evil of human 
character the sweeping flood of indiscriminate praise, or cen- 
sure as unmitigated. So does not the Judge of all the 
earth. His tribunal metes out a more exact sentence. And, 
in his Scriptures, with what impartiality does he detect some 
good thing to be found towards the Lord God, even in the 
house of Jeroboam, the corrupter of Israel. Dark as was 
the depravity of Ahab, " who sold himself to work wicked- 
ness," inspiration draws no veil over the brief interval of 
light in his history, that shot, like a moment of unnatural 
sunshine, across the depth of midnight darkness. And 
Christ himself, the chiefest missionary of the church, taught 
his disciples to learn wisdom from the policy of the fraudu- 
lent steward, and the fears of the unjust judge. Truth, 
then, may well afford to be just even to error, and to glean 
even from such fields lessons of wisdom. No missionary 
undertakings have embodied a greater array of talent, been 
arranged with more masterly skill, displayed more illustri- 
ous proofs of courage and of patience, or wielded a wider 
influence, than those of the Society of Loyola. Baxter con- 
fessed that their labors moved him to emulation, and the 
Protestant Leibnitz, the scholar, the jurist, and the philoso- 
pher, the rival of Newton, has been their fervent eulogist. 

The character of Loyola, the founder, was deeply im- 
pressed on this order. On deserting the military life, he 
had spent a year in the most revolting austerities, and during 
this period composed his celebrated treatise. His attention 
now became turned to the salvation of his neighbor ; before, 
it had been engrossed by care for his own soul. To profit 



174 THE JESUITS, 

others, he must relinquish the squalid dress and some of the 
austere penances of his former course, and he felt also that 
he must remedy the defects of a neglected education. Now 
in the prime of manhood, he set himself down, nothing 
daunted or ashamed, among children, to learn his Latin 
grammar. His progress was slow and painful. At the Uni- 
versity of Paris he gathered around him his first associates. 
Their early design was a mission to Palestine. War frus- 
trated this. They offered themselves for the service of the 
supreme pontiff, at their own charge, in whatever part of the 
world he might command. This offer won the reluctant 
consent of the Romish see to their establishment in 1540. 
They were thus missionaries from their first constitution. 
Long a soldier, Loyola had felt both the need of discipline 
and its power. Reminiscences of his military course appear 
in the whole structure, as in the very title, of his Spiritual 
Exercises. It seems, from the description given of it, to be 
but the drill-book of a spiritual regiment. The treatise is 
said to represent the world as divided into two hosts, the 
one arrayed under the banners of Christ, and the other up- 
lifting the standard of Satan ; and, inviting the reader to 
enlist with his Redeemer, furnishes marks by which he may 
judge of the work appointed him, and rules for its accom- 
plishment. Obedience, incessant and implicit, such as is 
elsewhere scarce found out of a camp, was Loyola's favor- 
ite lesson. It was in his order the subject of a special vow. 
They swore it to the pope and to their superior, called their 
general, who was elected for life, and clothed with absolute 
power. Ignatius was accustomed to term such obedience 
the most sublime of virtues, the daughter of humility, and 
the nurse of charity, a guide that never wandered, and the 
mark that was to distinguish his order from all others. Ex- 
acting it most rigidly from others, he displayed it himself, in 
an implicit deference to his physicians and his confessor ; 
while to the Roman pontiff so profound was his submission, 
that he was accustomed to say, at the command of the pope 
he would embark on a mission for any shore in a vessel 
without rudder, or sails, or mast, or stores. When the ob- 
jection was made, that such conduct would be inconsistent 
with ordinary prudence, his reply was, that prudence was 
the virtue of the ruler, not of the ruled. His last will, as 
ho termed it, was but an unfinished homily on obedience. 
Yet in all this, the object of Ignatius does not seem to 



AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 175 

have been consciously, his own personal aggrandizement. 
Wealth, fame, and even power he seems to have sought less 
than usefulness. The first year of his religious course had 
been one of stormy fanaticism ; the rest of his career breathed 
a high, sustained enthusiasm. He dreaded, as he often said, 
worldly prosperity for his order, excluded its members from 
episcopal preferment, and by earnest remonstrances pre- 
vented the elevation of two of his early associates, Lainez 
and Borgia, to the cardinalate. He spent much time in 
prayer, and laid more stress than many Roman religionists 
on the prayer of the heart, while Thomas a Kempis was his 
favorite book of devotion. Simple and severe in his own 
personal habits, his labors never remitted. Lodging in hos- 
pitals, tending their sick, catechizing children, seeking the 
restoration of the profligate, wherever he went, he gave him- 
self to the toils of benevolence. 

Seeing that the emergencies of the time required not the 
retired life — the contemplative one, as it was called, of the 
monastic orders — he desired for his institute a life of active. 
piety. The three great duties of the order from the begin- 
ning were announced, as being the education of youth, con- 
troversy with heretics, and the conversion of the heathen. 
They were to be men of the world, and not of the cloister. 
Hence he procured them exemption from the chants and 
choral services customary with many Romish fraternities. 
" They do not sing," said the enemies of the Jesuits, "birds 
of prey never do." Yet to maintain their devotional feel- 
ings, there were many provisions. One especially was, that, 
for a space of eight days in each year, every member of the 
order should make " a retreat," as it was called, retiring 
from the world, and devoting himself to the study of his 
heart and way, by the help of the Spiritual Exercises. With 
the zeal of Loyola was mingled much knowledge of the 
world. With the merchant he spoke of traffic, and with the 
scholar of books, that he might attract both to religion ; en- 
tering, as he described it, at their door, that he might leave 
at his own. What in him, however, seems to have been 
little more than skilful courtesy not inconsistent with real 
principle, became, in the latter members of the order, a sup- 
ple and lithe pliability, alike unprincipled and selfish. 

To exercise and perfect their great principle of obedience, 
the rules of the society were most skilfully framed. Their 
colleges gave them facilities for the selection of the most, 



176 THE JESUITS, 

brilliant talents. A long novitiate and varied trials preceded 
admission to the full privileges of the order. Every one on 
entering it was required to make a full manifestation, as it 
was termed, of his conscience, giving the minutest and most 
private details of his past history and feelings. This was 
repeated each half year. Each member was constituted a 
spy upon his fellow. Regular reports of every incident of 
moment, and of the character and deportment of each mem- 
ber, were made to the provincial, and from the provincial 
were transmitted to the general at Rome, to be transcribed 
into the archives of the order. From the will of this gene- 
ral there lay no appeal ; complaint was sin, and resistance 
ruin. In the whole society, there was but one will, but one 
conscience, and it was in the bosom of the general. So true 
a despotism Tiberius never attempted, and Machiavelli him- 
self could not have imagined. Superstition only could have 
made men its willing subjects. The individual being was 
lost in one vast machine, all the parts of which were intelli- 
gent to observe, the eyes of one soul, and strong to obey, 
the hands of one will. Limited at first to sixty members, 
but soon left without such restriction, the order increased in 
sixty years from ten to 10,000 members, and in 1710 the 
Jesuits numbered about 20,000 in their wide-spread associa- 
tion. These, scattered through all countries, men of the 
finest talents and most finished education, wearing every 
garb, and speaking every language, formed a body that 
could outwatch Argus with his hundred eyes, and outwork 
Briareus with his hundred hands. It is readily seen what 
tremendous energies such a system wielded. In every other 
combination of human effort, much of power is lost, not 
only by the resistance to be overcome in the world without, 
but by the discord and internal weakness of the combined 
parties within themselves, and the lumbering weight of the 
machinery upon which the motive power acts. The steeds 
may be the fiery coursers of the sun, with power flaming 
from every nostril, but where is the mortal hand that can 
rein the whole into one path, and bring the might of all their 
sinews to draw in one onward track ? It was not so in this 
institution. Here, as in the chariot of the prophet's vision, 
all was instinct witli one will ; " the spirit of the living crea- 
tures was in the wheels ; when the living creatures went, 
the wheels went by them, when those stood, these stood ; 
when the living creatures were lifted up, the wheels were 



AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 177 

lifted up over against them, and their rings were full of eyes 
round about, and they were so high that they were dread- 
ful. " One soul swayed the vast mass ; and every eog and 
pin in the machinery consented with its whole power to 
every movement of the one central conscience. The world 
never had seen so perfect a despotism ; yet never was any 
government so ardently loved by its earlier members. " If 
I forget thee, O Society of Jesus," exclaimed Xavier in 
India, " may my right hand forget its cunning." 

The man, who thus spoke, is their greatest name ; and 
he would not have felt this affection, had the order been 
originally as corrupt as it afterwards became. Gladly, did 
our limits permit, would we dwell on his history. A man 
of higher talent than Loyola, a ripe scholar, and of that 
commanding courage which nothing could daunt, there were 
also in him a fervent piety, and boundless self-sacrificing 
benevolence, that all the errors of his faith could not obscure. 
On the Malabar coast, in the kingdom of Iravancore, where 
he gave baptism to 10,000 in one month with his own hand, 
in the Moluccas, and in Ceylon, he labored in perils immi- 
nent, and amid great privations and difficulties, but never 
without fruit. His chief triumphs were, however, in Japan. 
Having seen the principles of his religion spreading rapidly 
through that empire, he longed next to enter China. With 
the assurance that it was at the risk of his life, he bargained 
but to be put ashore on its inhospitable coast. They who 
were to have done this failed him ; and in sight of the em- 
pire which he was not allowed to enter, on the small rocky 
island of Sancian, he breathed his last. Dying thus, with 
his last and greatest enterprise unachieved, he yet laid his 
body thus as on the counterscarp, leaving to the ranks be- 
hind, a name and example that never lost their rallying 
power, until these ramparts of heathenism were scaled, and 
China too was entered and won. In Japan, the order fol- 
lowed up his plans, until their converts had reached the 
number of 200,000. The Jesuit fathers who succeeded in 
forcing the barriers of China — Ricci, Scholl, and Verbiest — 
were men distinguished in science and talent. The manu- 
scripts left by some of them are said to show too — written 
evidently but for their own use — that they were men of 
piety. Of some of them at least, Milne, and Morrison, and 
other Protestant missionaries have thought highly, as men 
of real devotedness and mistaken piety. At one time, there 

24 



1?8 THE JESUITS, 

seemed reason to expect that the Celestial Empire was to 
become Christian, the empress herself having joined the 
Christian Church, the emperor being known as their patron, 
and Jesuit fathers filling the highest posts at court, and dis- 
playing their varied attainments as geographers, legislators, 
philosophers and astronomers, and even as cannon-founders. 
The same indefatigable community were busily assailing the 
Fetichism of Africa on the west and east, and its Moham- 
medanism on the north. They had their missionary enter- 
prises at Congo and Loango, at Tripoli and Morocco, and 
Monomotapa and Mozambique. In Abyssinia, after frequent 
repulses, they acquired at one time the ascendency, and a 
Jesuit was made the patriarch of the national church ; but 
his innovations and inquisitorial cruelties soon wrought the 
indignant expulsion of the religion they were intended to 
establish. In Egypt, too, their laborers were early found ; 
and in Asia, besides the points already enumerated, they 
toiled in India and Persia. In Syria and Thibet, the sons 
of Loyola were lifting the banners of the Romish church. 

On our own shores, their missionaries, as we have already 
seen, were found at an early day. They followed the red 
man to his haunts, paddled with him the rude canoe, reared 
beside his their hut, and displayed a patient and winning- 
sweetness, that disarmed his ferocity. The tribes beside 
our great inland seas claimed more than a century ago, the 
care of the Jesuit fathers. Sault de St. Marie and Mackinaw 
were sites of their missions ; and yet beyond these places 
there were points where the wandering son of Loyola reared 
his wooden crucifix, and built his bark chapel, in regions 
that even in our own late day the westward wave of emigra- 
tion has not yet reached. To other parts of North America 
the same fraternity had expanded their establishments. In 
the peninsula of California, they gathered villages of con- 
verted Indians that still exist, although in a declining state 
and under the charge since of other religious orders. In 
Mexico, also, they labored for the conversion of the Abori- 
gines. In the southern portion of our continent were, how- 
ever, the scenes of their greatest toils and their most glori- 
ous triumphs. They labored in Peru and in Chili. Far 
more repulsive was the field chosen, however, by those of 
the Jesuit fathers who, like Ortega and Nobregas, labored 
among the cannibals of Brazil. Tribes, with whom the flesh 
of their captives was the choicest of dainties, and whose older 



AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 179 

women bore to the battle-field the vessels in which the 
horrid banquet of victory was to be prepared, were compel- 
led at length to yield to the dauntless zeal of the intrepid 
missionary ; and, relinquishing their cannibalism, learned 
gentleness and piety. But their most splendid honors were 
won in the neighboring country of Paraguay. They found 
its wide plains traversed by numerous but divided hordes, 
ignorant of the simplest arts, impatient of restraint, and 
prompt to deeds of blood. Gathering at first but some fifty 
families, they reared at last a community which was esti- 
mated at one time to number 300,000 souls. The Indian 
was instructed in agriculture and the handicraft arts, in 
music, and even in painting. Villages, or Reductions, as 
they were called, rose rapidly, where an Arcadian purity 
of manners reigned through communities of thousands, who 
had but recently been roving, lawless savages. They labor- 
ed for a common stock, and subsisted on the common stores. 
Never, probably, has the experiment of a community of pos- 
sessions been so long tried, and so successfully, as it was 
there. Yet, beneficent as was the Jesuit rule over these 
their subjects, it was so absolute, that their converts might 
be said never to have outgrown the state of nonage. Theirs 
was a filial servitude. 

In all these their missions, the order displayed an indomi- 
table energy, and a spirit of most adventurous enterprise. 
As dauntless as they were versatile, and as unwearied as 
they were dauntless, the door closed against them was 
undermined, if it could not be opened, and stormed where 
it could not be undermined. Martyrdom for them had no 
terrors. Did the news return to their colleges in Europe of 
a missionary falling riddled by the arrows of the Brazilian 
savage, at the foot of the crucifix he had planted, or of 
scores sent into the depths of ocean by heretic captors, the 
names of the fallen were inserted on the rubrics of Jesuit 
martyrs ; and not the students only, but the professors of 
their institutions rushed to fill the ranks that had been thus 
thinned. And, turning from their fields of missionary en- 
terprise in the far East, and in the remotest West, to what 
they had accomplished in Europe, there was much at this 
time to stir the Jesuit to self-gratulation. Their science, 
and address, and renunciation of ecclesiastical preferment 
had made members of their order confessors to some of the 
most powerful monarchs. In controversy, they had given 



180 THE JESUITS, 

to the Romish church Bellarmine, the ablest of her defend- 
ers, and, though a Jesuit, perhaps also the most candid of 
Romish controversialists. To the French pulpit they had 
furnished Bourdaloue, among its great names no weaker 
luminary, and perhaps its first reasoner. Their divines, ora- 
tors, poets, historians and critics were well nigh numberless, 
the order claiming to have produced more distinguished 
scholars than all the other Romish communities together. 
In education, they had been the benefactors of the world. 
Their institutions are proposed by Bacon as the best of 
models, and Mackintosh has pronounced the strides made by 
the society in the work of instruction the greatest ever wit- 
nessed. But in missions was the beginning of their strength, 
and the excellency of their glory. The character of Xavier 
gave to the cause of evangelization an impulse such as it had 
not received for seven centuries ; and to this day, his church 
looks in vain for one, who, to his dauntless zeal and his un- 
tiring patience, has united the splendor of his talents, and 
his wide influence, that went overrunning a nation like some 
great conflagration. Through all these fields of labor they 
continued to diffuse one spirit, not spent by toil, and not 
diminished by distance from the centre of power. From the 
man, who sat in a gilded confessional with a monarch for 
his penitent, amid the splendid luxury of Versailles or Ma- 
drid, to him who in a wigwam of bark shared the rude fare 
of the Canadian Indian, sleeping on the skin won in the 
chase, and lighted by the blazing pine-knot, one soul pos- 
sessed the entire body. From East to West, from North to 
South, the sons of Ignatius were pursuing one object through 
a thousand mazy channels. The motto and device in one 
of their earlier histories was well illustrated in their conduct. 
That device was a mirror, and the superscription was " Om- 
nia omnibus," All things to all men. But what in Paul 
was Christian courtesy, leaning on inflexible principle ; and 
what in Loyola himself was probably wisdom, but slightly 
tinged with unwarrantable policy, became, in some of his 
disciples, the laxest casuistry, chameleon-like, shifting its 
hues to every varying shade of interest or fashion. 

There was much in the nature of Romanism itself to make 
the work of proselytism easy and rapid. The priest went 
forth a solitary man, with no ties to any spot, with few 
incumbrances, moving freely and at little cost through wide 
districts. The rites that he celebrated took the senses of 



AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 181 

the rude barbarian as by storm. The music, the incense, 
the gorgeous robe, the golden vessels, the picture, the statue, 
and the crucifix were to the savage most imposing. Again, 
no change of heart was requisite to baptism. No long fami- 
liarity with Scripture preceded entrance to the church. The 
creed, the catechism,* and a few prayers and hymns were to 
be translated, and a nation was supplied with its religious 
literature. Submission to external rites, and a blind defer- 
ence to priestly authority, threw open the doors of the church 
as to the rushing feet of a nation. They who entered it, 
found it was not the holy of holies they had reached. We 
do not mean to say, that there was no holy fruit in their 
religion. We would only speak of the low form of Chris- 
tian character they had proposed for their converts. Yet 
we believe the morals of their disciples were generally higher 
than those of the converts gained by other orders ; and the 
constancy, with which such multitudes in their Japanese 
churches endured the most appalling forms of martyrdom, 
allows us to hope, that under much of superstition and much 
of ignorance, there was also something of love to Christ. 

Yet from this height of success, and influence, and honors 
they were doomed to fall, and for a time the world seemed 
to shake with their far-resounding ruin. In Japan, their 
200,000 converts, exciting, justly or unjustly, apprehension, 
of political intrigue in the mind of a native prince, who was 
consolidating the kingdoms of Japan into one empire, they 
were exterminated by one of the fiercest persecutions that 
Christianity has ever experienced. Multitudes perished in 
prison ; some were buried in ditches, others, immersed in 
freezing water, died a death of lingering agony ; some were 
crucified, others were beheaded ; and large numbers were 
thrown into one of the volcanic craters of the country, while 
the crosses of the Jesuit pastors studded the edges of the 
fearful cavity into which their flocks were hurried. That 
country has been thenceforward sealed against the gospel 
more closely than any other heathen land on the earth. It 
was, perhaps, one instance of those fearful retributions, that, 
in the language of Bacon, are occasionally written by the 
hand of Nemesis along the highway of nations, in characters 
which he that runneth may read, that the Japanese were 

* Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, furnishes a curious specimen of one of t 
the Jesuit catechisms, used among our American Indians. 



182 THE JESUITS, 

instigated, in this extinction of the Jesuit churches, by the 
Dutch, a people who had never forgotten the butcheries of 
the ferocious Alva, and thus requited on the rising Romanism 
of the East the wrongs that religion had wrought them in the 
West. In China, contentions with other Romish orders 
thwarted their labors ; their political power was soon lost, 
and their converts were driven intc concealment. But though 
denounced by edicts of the empire, and on pain of death ex- 
pelled from its territories, they have never ceased laboring 
there, and the Catholic Christians at this hour secreted in 
the bosom of that nation, are calculated by Medhurst at 
200,000. In Paraguay and in California, their settlements 
have been transferred to the charge of other orders, and 
themselves were exiled, as was also the case in the Philip- 
pine Islands. Their expulsion from the fields in South Amer- 
ica, watered so freely with the wealth, and talents, and best 
blood of the order, grew out of their disgrace in Europe. In 
France, they had denounced and suppressed Jansenism ; but 
received in their conflict with that body of most able and 
holy men, the Port Royalists, a death ful arrow they could 
never extricate. We need not say we allude to the Provin- 
cial Letters of Pascal, a work whose mingling powers of wit, 
and argument, and eloquence, well nigh unrivalled apart, and 
in their union unequalled, fixed the ultimate fate of the Je- 
suit order. They stood up, too. in the same country, in the 
days of their own intellectual decrepitude, to wrestle against 
the young scepticism of the Regency and of the days of 
Louis XV. Voltaire, and Diderot, and D'Holbach, and Hel- 
vetius, men educated in their own colleges, overwhelmed 
their old teachers with sarcasm, and irony, and wit, the more 
burning in its severity often, because it was the language of 
truth. To every state they had made themselves odious by 
intermingling themselves with political affairs. In their own 
church they found the bitterest enemies, in the worldly who 
envied their power, and in the zealous, who detested their 
lax casuistry and their erroneous doctrine. By principles, 
which if not their own invention, were at least their favorite 
implements, they explained away all obligation ; and some of 
their doctors seemed scarce to have left faith on the earth, or 
justice in the heavens. In short, they threw conscience into 
the alembic, and drew from the retort a mixture, like the 
aqua Tofana of Italian poisons, clear as the water that streams 
from the rock, but to drink of which was lingering, inevitable 



AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 183 

death. This laxity of moral teaching was felt to be the 
more inexcusable, in a body who had constituted themselves 
the jealous guardians of what they called orthodoxy in doc- 
trine : " a sort of men," as said the Abbe Boileau, brother of 
the poet, "who set themselves to lengthen the creed, and 
abridge the commandments." Casuistry became in their 
hands, as Bayle has well called it, "the art of cavilling with 
God." But men, even the vilest, cannot long respect those 
who pander to their corruptions, and the order soon fell un- 
der the ban of the human race. Their principles in morals, 
too, reacted upon themselves. Like the French poisoner, 
who perished by the fall of his mask, inhaling unexpectedly 
the fumes of the poison he was compounding for others, the 
order could not retain its old zeal, and the life of its early 
fanaticism, while propagating such sentiments. Some, even, 
of the Jesuit missionaries to heathenism were, it is said, in 
secret, infidels. At Rome itself, they had become tools more 
convenient than reputable. None had done more than they 
to uphold the staggering power of that see ; and no less than 
ninety bulls issued from under the Fisherman's Ring had 
attested the esteem in which the Vatican held them, and its 
resolution to defend them against their embittered foes. But 
its power now failed. Catholic France, and Portugal, and 
Spain, were resolutely bent on the ruin of the order. The 
arts, both of policy and force, they had so long practised, 
were now turned against them. With a secresy they had 
never surpassed in their own movements, the measures were 
concerted for their expulsion from Spain and Portugal. 
Driven from their colleges and possessions, blackened in 
character, and destitute, and many of them aged, they were 
hurled on the charities of a world they had not propitiated 
by their former conduct. Never slow, in the day of their 
power, to use the arm of the civil government for the purpose 
of persecution, they now felt its weight upon themselves. 
They had instigated in France the bloody massacre of St. 
Bartholomew, it is said, and had most certainly shared largely 
in the perfidy, the frauds, and the revolting dragoonades that 
procured and followed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantz. 
The recompense long accumulating now descended. Reluc- 
tantly, but necessarily, the Roman court itself withdrew in 
terror from these its stanchest servants, and pronounced with 
faltering lips, the dissolution of the order. 

They had forgotten, in their abuse of power, and talent. 



184 THE JESUITS, 

and influence, that there was on high One mightier tha *11 
the mighty of earth, whom they had subsidized, or flatt* id, 
or corrupted. Providence, an element upon which in 4 teir 
latter days they had forgotten to calculate, was now me' ting 
them at every turn. If they had lost sight of it, never had 
it lost sight of them. It used no confessors, and they could 
not guide it ; nor did it wait in its movements for the shuf- 
fling of the pieces on the checker-boards of earthly cabinets, 
which Jesuitism watched so narrowly. But when its fulness 
of times was come, it called, and every stormy passion of 
human nature rushed at its bidding, eager to do the work of 
retribution ; while, unpitied, Jesuitism stood to bear, in its 
loneliness, the meeting vengeance of earth and heaven. 

Never had Romanism progeny that bore more periectly its 
own image, or embodied its grand principles so faitlifully as 
did the Jesuit system. The principle of the order was but a 
reduction to its simplest essence of that one master idea of 
the Romish creed — implict faith — unlimited obedience. 
These are, in justice, due only to a Being of infinite truth, 
and underived, and unending sovereignty. Nothing less able 
or less wise, nothing short of the divine wisdom, that cannot 
mistake, and that will not deceive, is entitled to demand such 
subjection and confidence. It is the great sin of the Romish 
apostasy, its npwrov ipsvSos, that it has here arrogated the prero- 
gative of the Godhead, and in the seat of God given itself 
out as God over the human conscience and heart. This it is 
that constitutes the Antichrist, the rival usurping the rights 
of the Christ. For that Saviour, who created and ransomed 
the soul, whose eye pervades its depths with a searching 
omniscience, and whose hand encompasses it in all its wan- 
derings with an ever-present almightiness, is entitled to the 
absolute rule and dominion of that soul. Romanism has, 
however, demanded this power. For faith in Christ, as the 
one condition of salvation, it has substituted faith in the 
church. Jesuitism, with its wonted sagacity, saw, that in 
this claim lay the strength of the Romish system. It rose up 
to preach the doctrine to a world whom the Reformation 
was fast alienating. It rose up to exemplify the obedience, 
in its own unreserved, unquestioning submission to its own 
general, and through him to the Romish see. But while they 
thus acquired power, they were also sowing the seeds of de- 
cay. By this implicit obedience, the individual merged his 
personal rights and his spiritual existence in the society. 



AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 185 

The mass had a conscience ; but the members had not. But 
while they formed thus obedient societies, because there was 
no individuality of opinion or will, there was as much of in- 
trinsic weakness, as there was of quiet in the body. Remove 
the head, and the life had departed from an entire commu- 
nity. They destroyed, also, by this same process the higher 
order of talents, which act only in a state of comparative 
freedom. Splendid as were their scholars in every walk, 
yet, as Mackintosh has remarked, through two centuries of 
power and fame, they gave to Europe no genius to be named 
with Racine and Pascal, men who sprung from the Port 
Royalists, in the career, both far more brief and far more 
stormy, of that persecuted community. 

In this, his distinctive trait of character, the Jesuit stood as 
the moral antipodes of the Puritan. In the latter, the Re- 
formation presented its principle, the right of private judg- 
ment, as displayed in its barest, broadest shape. While, in 
the Jesuit, the man was nought, and the community was 
every thing, with the Puritan, on the contrary, the society 
was comparatively nothing, and the individual all. With him 
religion was, in its highest privileges, and its profoundest 
mysteries, a personal matter. He studied his Bible for him- 
self; to aid in turning its pages and loosening its seal, God 
the Son, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, stooped over him 
as he read ; and to reveal its inner lessons, God the Spirit 
whispered in his heart, and brooded over the depths of his 
soul. He profited by the prayers and teachings of his pastor, 
gave liberally for his support, and received reverently at his 
hands the sacramental symbols ; but he believed even this 
his beloved guide, companion and friend, but a fellow-ser- 
vant, whose help could not supersede his own private studies, 
and his individual faith. He valued his fellow-Christians, 
communed with them, prayed with them, shared with them 
his last loaf, and falling into their ranks, raised with them the 
battle-cry, " The sword of the Lord and of Gideon !" But, 
away from pastor and from fellow-Christian, the Puritan 
turned in the trying hour to his God. It was the genius of 
this system to develop the individual ; and in every emergen- 
cy, to throw him in the last resort upon the lonely commu- 
nings of his own soul with its Creator. It taught him to 
make religion, in the affecting language of one of the later 
Platonists, " the flight of one alone to the only One." # To the 

* Qvyrj fjiovov rrpos Top Moj/oy. 

25 



186 THE JESUITS, 

place of audience the petitioner went by no deputy ; but the 
individual man was brought to confront for himself the one 
Mediator, and to hear for himself the response of Heaven to 
the prayer of faith. When mind was thus thrown upon its 
individual responsibility, and came forth from its solitary 
meditations to the place of conference and action, there was 
frequent dissonance in- opinion ; and a collision in action, of- 
ten more apparent than real, threatened at times to rend the 
social bonds, to break up all concert, and to destroy all 
power. Yet conscientious men were not likely to differ 
widely or long. And, on the other hand, take from such a 
community its spiritual guides, and how soon were they re- 
placed. Persecute them, and how indomitable was their 
faith. Scatter them, and how rapidly were they propagated. 
Jesuitism gathered more numerous and united societies ; but 
they were societies of men without consciences and without a 
will, whose judgments and souls were under the lock of the 
confessional, or were carried about under the frock of their 
Jesuit pastor. Kind he might be and faithful, but did death 
remove him, or persecution exile the shepherd and disperse 
the flock, they had no rallying power. Like the seeds from 
which the industrious ant has removed the germinating 
principle, the largest hoard, when scattered, brought no har- 
vest. 

It were a curious employment, to trace the unwitting 
adoption, at times in our own land, of this great principle of 
Romanism, of which the Jesuit order was the embodiment 
and incarnation, as if it were one of the radical truths of de- 
mocracy — we mean, the principle of the absorption of the 
individual conscience into that of the mass. It is to some au 
essential law of democracy, that the many have unlimited 
power over the will and conscience of the [ew. Yet it would 
require little of time or of labor to show, how fatal is stich a 
principle to the rights of conscience, and the interests of 
truth. God made man apart. Apart he is regenerated. 
Apart he dies. Apart he is judged. To each of us his 
Maker gave a conscience, but to none of us did he assign a 
conscience-keeper. Man was not made for society, but so- 
ciety was made for man. Back of its first institution, lie 
some of his inalienable rights, and his first and most sacred 
duties. Communities of men, then, cannot receive, and 
should not ask, any transfer of conscience. Between a 
man's own spirit and his God, neither king, nor kaysar, nor 



AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 181 

congress, synod, nor pontiff, voluntary societies, nor compul- 
sory societies, if such there be, may lay sceptre or crosier, edict 
or vote. The thing is a grand impertinence. When per- 
sonal duty is involved, to his own Master the man stands or 
falls. We mean not these remarks for those duties which 
man owes to society, and where their laws may rightfully 
control and punish him. We speak of the far wider field 
over which some would extend those laws, and where they 
do not justly come, where a man walks accountable to his 
God only, and where, if human legislation follow him, it is 
usurpation upon the rights of man, and impiety against his 
Maker. We know how irksome to many is all noise of dis- 
sent and all free expression of private judgment. To remedy 
and reform all this dangerous independence, this ominous 
revolt against parental care, was the high attempt of Jesuit- 
ism. Let those, who envy to that society their fame and their 
late, tread in their steps, breaking down the individual man 
to build up the man social. 

Another remarkable feature in the Jesuit order, illustrated 
in the history of all their missions, was their fatal principle 
of accommodation — one in the use of which they alternatety 
triumphed and fell. The gospel is to be presented with no 
needless offence given to the prejudices and habits of the 
heathen, but the gospel itself is never to be mutilated or dis- 
guised ; nor is the ministry ever to stoop to compliances in 
themselves sinful. The Jesuit mistook or forgot this. From 
a very early period, the order were famed for the art with 
which they studied to accommodate themselves and their . 
religion to the tastes of the nation they would evangelize. 
Iiicei, on entering China, found the bonzes, the priests of 
the nation ; and to secure respect, himself and his associates 
adopted the habits and dress of the bonzes. But a short ac- 
quaintance with the empire taught him, that the whole class 
of the priesthood was in China a despised one, and that he 
had been only attracting gratuitous odium in assuming their 
garb. He therefore relinquished it again, to take that of the 
men of letters. In India, some of their number adopted the 
Braminical dress, and others conformed to the disgusting 
habits of the Fakeer and the Yogee, the hermits and peni- 
tents of the Mohammedan and Hindoo superstition. Swartz 
met a catholic missionary, arrayed in the style of the Pagan 
priests, wearing their yellow robe, and having like them a 
drum beaten before him. It would seem upon such principles 



188 THE JESUITS, 

of action, as if their next step ought to have been the 
creation of a Christian Juggernaut ; or to have arranged the 
Christian suttee, where the widow might burn according to 
the forms of the Romish breviary ; or to have organized a 
band of Romanist Thugs, strangling in the name of the vir- 
gin, as did their Hindoo brethren for the honor of Kalee. In 
South America, one of the zealous Jesuit fathers, finding that 
the Payernes, as the sorcerers and priests of the tribe were 
called, were accustomed to dance and sing in giving their 
religious instructions, put his preachments into metre, and 
copied the movements of these Pagan priests, that he might 
win the savage by the forms to which he had been accus- 
tomed. In China, again, they found the worship of deceased 
ancestors generally prevailing. Failing to supplant the prac- 
tice, they proceeded to legitimate it. They even allowed 
worship to be paid to Confucius, the atheistical philosopher 
of China, provided their converts would, in offering the wor- 
ship, conceal upon the altar a crucifix to which their homage 
should be secretly directed. Finding the adoration of a cru- 
cified Saviour unpopular among that self-sufficient people, 
they are accused by their own Romanist brethren of having 
suppressed in their teachings the mystery of the cross, and 
preached Christ glorified, but not Christ in his humiliation, 
his agony and his death. A more arrogant act than this the 
wisdom of this world has seldom perpetrated, when it has 
undertaken to modify and adorn the gospel of the crucified 
Nazarene. 

But to Robert de Nobilibus, the nephew of Bellarmine, 
and the near kinsman of one of the pontiffs, a man of distin- 
guished talent and zeal, laboring in India, it was reserved to 
exhibit one of the worst instances of this fatal spirit. Find- 
ing the Bramins in possession of the spiritual power, he pub- 
lished abroad that the Bramins of Rome were the kindred, 
but the seniors and the superiors of those of India. Enmity 
may have charged him falsely, in declaring that he forged 
deeds, in which a direct descent was claimed for these West- 
ern Bramins from Brama himself, the chief god of Hindoo 
idolatry ; but it is certain, that in this or some other mode he 
made the new faith so popular, that twelve, or as some ac- 
counts state, seventy of the Indian Bramins became his 
coadjutors ; and after his death, with the collusion of the Portu- 
guese priests, the new sect went on still triumphing. But 
even the Romish see repudiated such conversions as these ; 



AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 189 

ond a bull from the Vatican extinguished the new commu- 
nion. To this same able but treacherous laborer belongs 
the fame of another kindred achievement. He composed in 
the language of the country a treatise in favor of Christianity. 
The work had the title of the Ezour Vedam. It was intended 
to sap the scepticism of the East ; but so covertly, though 
with much ability, did it undertake the task, that having been 
translated and reaching France, where it fell into the hands 
of Voltaire, he pounced upon it as an ancient Braminical 
treatise, full of Oriental wisdom, and proving that Christian- 
ity had borrowed its chief doctrines from Eastern sources. 
Thus, while laboring to destroy unbelief in India, he became 
in the next century instrumental in aiding its progress in 
Europe. The Jesuit, caught in his own snare, was made 
from his grave to lend weapons to the scoffer; while the 
arch-mocker, the patriarch of French infidelity, entangled in 
the toils of that wilful credulity which has distinguished so 
many eminent unbelievers, quoted the work of modern Je- 
suitism as an undoubted monument of ancient Braminism. 
Thus are the wise taken in their own craftiness, when in 
their self-confidence they undertake either to patronize or to 
impugn the gospel of the Nazarene. 

We need scarcely to name another defect of the Jesuit mis- 
sions, which must have occurred to all — their fatal neglect 
of the. Scriptures. Even Xavier translated into Japanese but 
the creed, the Lord's prayer, and a brief catechism, and after- 
wards a Life of the Saviour compliled from the Gospels. 
The Lives of the Saints afterwards appeared in that lan- 
guage. In the tongue of China the Jesuits acquired such 
proficiency as to become voluminous authors, writing, it is 
said, hundreds of books; but although they translated the 
ponderous Sum of Theology of Thomas Aquinas into Chi- 
nese, the Scriptures seem to have been thought a needless or 
dangerous book, and a compend of the gospel history was, 
we believe, their chief work in the form of scriptural transla- 
tion. With no religious light but that emanating from the 
altar and pulpit, their churches were, when persecution veil- 
ed these, left in thick darkness. The Jesuits, anxious to 
shut up their converts into a safe and orthodox submission, 
seem to have preferred this fearful risk, to the peril of leaving 
the lively oracles to beam forth their living brightness 
upon the minds of their people. Hence the Catholics, linger- 
ing still in the Celestial Empire, and their Indian neophytes 



190 THE JESUITS, 

in Paraguay and California, have probably never known, 
scarce even by name, those Scriptures which are the right- 
ful heritage of every Christian. Nor, for their own use, 
even,did their missionaries prize the Bible aright. Does the 
Jesuit father appear in the midst of a savage tribe to harangue 
them on his religion ; or is he dragged by them a daunt- 
less victim to the stake ; the one volume, that is seen sus- 
pended from his neck, is not the Bible, but his breviary. In 
all this, the Jesuit was but acting with other Romanists. 
That church has assumed the fearful responsibility of shut- 
ting out the sunlight of divine revelation ; undertaking, in its 
stead, to supply the reflected light, the moonbeams of tradi- 
tion — a gentler brightness, under which no eye will be daz- 
zled, by which no mind will be quickened into too rapid a 
vegetation — a dubious gloom, favorable alike to wonder, to 
fear, to slumber, and to fraud. But as the sun will shine, so 
the Scriptures live on. They who preach the truth, but give 
not the Bible, withhold from their own teachings the most 
authoritative sanction. Those, on the contrary, whose doc- 
trine is a doctrine of falsehood, contravening and supersed- 
ing the Scriptures, must yet one day meet that light they 
would have obscured, and find themselves and all then- 
doings tried by the standard they would have fain displaced. 

The Jesuit order has been recently revived. Restored in 
our own times to existence by that see for which they con- 
tended so valiantly and effectively, it remains to be seen how 
far they will resume their ancient fields, and with what 
measure of their first zeal and success. Were they to throw 
themselves into the current of the age with the sinewy vigor 
and lithe pliability of former times, they may yet prove most 
formidable. Their power of attaching the heart is, by all 
who have closely observed them, confessed to be great. But 
the age is one far different from that in which they began 
their career, more impracticable, less liable to monopoly, and 
less patient of control. 

The men of a purer faith may well emulate their fearless 
heroism, their courtesy, their patience and industry. Amid 
the snows of Canada and on the fir-clad shores of our west- 
ern lakes, along the wilds where Orellana 

"rolls his world of waters to the sea," 

on the burning margin of Africa, in the sultry Hindostan, 
amid the millions of China and Japan, the fathers of the 



AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 191 

order of Loyola shrunk not from pain, or toil, or want, or 
death itself. When the plague wasted, and thousands were 
falling before it, in the deep pestilential holds of the galley 
where their Christian charge were held in bonds by their 
Turkish captors ; or in the heathen land when persecution 
had unleashed all its emissaries of terror and death, the Jesuit 
missionary was seen manifesting a serene courage, his stanch- 
est accusers might well envy. Had the order but fixed the 
cross in the heart, where they reared the crucifix in the 
market-place, had they given the Scriptures where they scat- 
tered legends, and labored for Christ as assiduously and 
boldly as they bled for the delusions of Antichrist, the whole 
history of the world had been altered. But had they done all 
this, the work of evangelizing the world would not have been 
left to become as it is, the blessed privilege of our own age. 
The failures of others, their corruptions and their deficien- 
cies, are part of the heritage of instruction that time has 
been accumulating for the benefit of the modern laborer, like 
the brass and iron of vanquished Syria, which David pro- 
vided for the temple that was to be reared by the hand of his 
son, the favored Solomon. 

The institution, on whose history we have dwelt, shows 
what a few resolute hearts may accomplish. When Ignatius 
with his first companions bound themselves, by a midnight 
vow, at Montmartre, near Paris, on the 15th of August, 1534, 
some three centuries ago, to renounce the world for the pur- 
pose of preaching the gospel, wherever the supreme pontiff 
might send them, the engagement, thus ratified in darkness 
and secrecy beside the slumbering capital of France, was 
one most momentous to the interests of our entire race. 
That company of seven poor students, with but zeal, talent, 
arid stout hearts, and a burning enthusiasm, formed then a 
bond far more important to the after history of mankind than 
most of the leagues made by kings at the head of embattled 
squadrons. We doubt if Talleyrand ever schemed, or Na- 
poleon, in his highest flights of victory, ever dictated so sig- 
nificant an act. In its moral sublimity, the act far transcend- 
ed that of Cortez and Pizarro receiving the mass in a Spanish 
church, upon their engagement to set out for the subversion 
of an American empire. In the shadows of that subterranean 
chapel, where these first Jesuits thus bound themselves, fancy 
sees Africa, and Asia, and our own America, watching intently 
a transaction, that was to affect so deeply their subsequent 



192 THE JESUITS, 

history. It remains for those rejoicing in the principles 
of the Reformation, to bring the devotedness and intre- 
pidity of the Jesuit to bear upon their own purer system, in 
the missionary field. With the incorruptible word of our 
God for our chosen weapon, victories impossible to them 
may become easy to us ; and what was but too often a for- 
gotten motto, on the surface of Jesuitism, may become a 
principle at the heart of the Protestant missionary, "All for 
the greater glory of God."* 

In the missionary toils, that are to aid in ushering in this 
day, do we expect too much from the youthful scholars of 
our country? Are not its colleges already sheltering those 
who are destined to become the heralds of Christianity to the 
far heathen ? On this theme, we would quote yet again from 
one on whose own history we should gladly have lingered 
longer, Francis Xavier. From one of his missions in Cochin 
China, this apostolic man wrote to the university of the Sor- 
bonne, then the focus of theological science to Catholic 
Europe, in language much of which we doubt not a Carey or 
a Martyn would not have hesitated to adopt. " I have often 
thought to run over all the universities of Europe, and espe- 
cially that of Paris, and to cry aloud to those who abound 
more in learning than in charity, O, how many souls are lost 
to heaven through your neglect ! Many would be moved. 
They would say, Behold me in readiness, O Lord ! How 
much more happily would these learned men then live — 
with how much more assurance die. Millions of idolaters 
might be easily converted, if there were more preachers who 
would sincerely mind the interests of Jesus Christ and not 
their own." 

The letter was read, admired and copied. We may sup- 
pose there were those who applauded and transcribed that 
letter, but failed to obey its summons ; to whose dying pillow 
that appeal came back, and sounded through the depths of 
the soul as the voice of neglected duty. May no such regrets 
disturb the hour of our dismission. May a life, instinct with 
zeal for God and love to man, and crowded with effort, make 
death, whether it come late or soon, the welcome discharge 
of a laborer found toiling at his post. And, my young breth- 
ren in Christ, permit a stranger to hope, that among the 
honors of your Alma Mater, and especially of this missionary 

* "Adnuijorcm Dei gloriam" the motto of Loyola. 



AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 193 

association gathered amongst her sons, it may yet be record- 
ed, that hence went forth men, who, on the stock of a purer 
faith, grafted the zeal of Francis Xavier, and, emulating his 
virtues, won a success more durable, because the means they 
employed were more scriptural — men, who, sitting at the 
Master's feet, and reflecting his image, and breathing his 
spirit, were recognized, by an admiring world and an ex- 
ulting church, as those who had been much with Christ and 
learned of him, and who belonged on earth, and would as- 
suredly, through all eternity, continue to belong, of a truth, 
and in the highest sense of the words, to " The Society 
of Jesus," 



2G 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 






Among the names which it is good to repeat, we know 
of none more inspiriting, as an example of ministerial devo- 
tedness, than that of Richard Baxter. Known to the 
mass of society, in every land where the English tongue is 
spoken, as the author of two of the most useful volumes in 
the religious literature of that language, rich as that literature 
is, he deserves to be remembered by the youthful pastor as 
a signal example of ministerial fidelity, and power, and suc- 
cess, even had he never written the Call to the Unconverted, 
or that gem of devout genius, the Saints' Everlasting Rest. 
And, bequeathing, as he did, not only the lustre of a brilliant 
example, but the rules of his own ministerial career, in his 
treatise, " The Reformed Pastor," he has acquired a title to 
be among those first named, whenever the eyes of the rising 
ministry are directed to the earlier worthies of the church. 

There is much in the character of the age to which he be- 
longed to make it deserving of profound study. Seasons of 
revolution, by affording the requisite emergencies, and open- 
ing a freer path to talent, are fertile in great men. His was 
an era of revolution, alike in the political and in the moral 
elements of society. The English throne was overturned, to 
be replaced by a republic, itself followed by the Protectorate, 
which gave place to a restoration of the Stuarts, soon to be 
expelled by the revolution of 1688. In science, the methods 
of Bacon, now first practically applied, were working momen- 
tous changes. It was the age in which flourished his great 
disciple, Boyle, and in which were trained up Newton and 
Locke, who attempted, with such splendid power, to carry 
out the principles of Bacon into the world of matter and the 
world of mind. Then, too, it was that Milton gave to the 
literature of England his great epic, yet standing in unap- 
proached and unapproachable grandeur. 

To the inhabitants of this country it must ever seem a 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 195 

momentous era, as being the age in English history, out of 
which the creative hand of Divine Providence took the mass 
with which he formed the elements of American freedom, 
and in which lay the germs of our religious, political, and 
social character. The England of those times was the Eden 
in which were formed the Adam and Eve of the New Eng- 
land colonies. And as matter, not of self-gratulation, but of 
devout gratitude, it deserves to be remembered, that the 
national mind in our ancestral land was never of such sinewy 
manliness, so deeply penetrated by conscientious feeling, and 
so thoroughly suffused with scriptural knowledge, so racy 
and so pure, as in this, the era of our birth as a people. 

To the Christian scholar, the period is one teeming with 
interest. In the church, no less than the world, it was an era 
of remarkable men, and yet more remarkable events. In the 
interval, stretching from the reign of the First to that of the 
Second James, there appeared some of the strongest and holi- 
est minds of the modern church. Never before or since, it is 
probable, was the Bible so thoroughly and devoutly studied 
by the British nation, as during that time. The effect was 
seen in the talent, and principle, and prowess of the states- 
men, the scholars, the divines, the preachers, and the heroes 
that then adorned " the sea-girt isle." In biblical science, it 
was then that Walton elaborated his Polyglott, and Lightfoot 
accumulated his stores of rabbinical lore, and then, that 
flourished Castell and Pocock. Usher, and Selden, and 
Gataker, and Gale, and Pool, the giants of the schools, 
were in the pulpits, aided by other laborers, whose writings 
and preachings have scarce been surpassed in power over 
the conscience and the heart. 

In the bounds of the English Establishment, a memorable 
revolution was undergone, not less entire or wondrous, and 
more lasting, than that which tore up the foundations, and 
for a time altered the whole frame-work of the national 
government. The accession of James I. had found the British 
church divided between two parties. On the one side was 
the body of the high-churchmen, of whom Laud became the 
head, the friends of arbitrary power, sticklers for order ; in 
doctrine, the patrons of Arminianism, lovers of ceremony, 
pomp and tradition, laying the utmost stress upon Episcopal 
ordination, and carrying to its farthest limits the Episcopal 
power, and accused, not without specious grounds, of a strong 
leaning to Romanism. With them were the court and the 



196 I<IFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 

star-chamber. On the opposite side stood the Puritans, 
Calvinists in doctrine, of the most austere morals, and the 
most exemplary pastors, and the most popular preachers of 
the country ; many of them friendly to ministerial parity, but 
all more strenuous for piety of heart, than any external con- 
formity to the rites of the church ; and, finally, the dauntless 
advocates of political freedom, to whom Hume traces its 
origin in the English Constitution. With these were the body 
of the Parliament, the hearts of the people, and the grace of 
God. In the days of the Commonwealth, the leaders of the 
high-church party lost all power. Laud, their chief, perished 
on the scaffold, and Episcopacy itself was abrogated. The 
Puritans, those of them at least who favored ministerial 
parity, were now in prosperity ; but shared it with many 
new communities, that, scattered by persecution and driven 
into close retirement during the days of the star-chamber, 
now burst into notice, and won rapidly bOvh numbers and 
power. The Restoration drove the mass of the Puritans, 
with these other sects, into nonconformity ; exiling from 
the Establishment a body of men as able and pious as it has 
ever possessed. But the national establishment was thus 
relieved of one party, only to receive another of far different 
character. The high-churchmen, of Laud's spirit, triumphed 
for a time in the court of the restored Stuarts ; but their in- 
tolerance, and bigotry, and general inferiority of character, 
soon yielded to the superior talents and reputation of a body 
that sprung up in the bosom of the church during the Com- 
monwealth, the latitudinarian divines, ae they were com- 
monly called. The growth of scepticism led them to study 
the outworks of Christian evidence. Against infidelity and 
popery they did good service in the cause of truth. Their 
dread of enthusiasm made them frigid, and their mastery of 
the ancient philosophy made them profound. Their doc- 
trines were generally Arminian. Their notions of church 
power were less rigid than those of the rival party, and they 
were also more tolerant of difference in opinion. But in 
their preaching they laid the whole stress, well nigh, of their 
efforts upon morals, to the neglect of doctrine ; and in the- 
ology, they attributed to human reason a strength and au- 
thority, which gradually opened the way to the invasion of 
the gravest heresies. Of generally purer character than their 
opponents, they were also abler preachers. But while valua- 
ble as moral treatises, their sermons were most defective ; 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 197 

for the peculiar doctrines and spirit of the gospel were 
evaporated. Such were the low-churchmen of this time. 
The revolution under William threw many of the high- 
church party into the ranks of the nonjurors, from their at- 
tachment to the Stuart family, and lost them their posts in 
the church ; while it left those who remained still in the na- 
tional Establishment, a weaker and a discredited party. The 
latitudinarian divines gradually rose to an undisputed ascen- 
dency, and gave to the whole of the church their principles, 
until Whitefield and Wesley found the nation, under their in- 
fluence, and their preaching of a morality well nigh dissev- 
ered from the gospel of the cross, rocked into insensibility, 
drenched with spiritual lethargy, and threatened by a wide- 
spreading profligacy and the rapid growth of infidelity. 
Thus it was that, with articles and formularies remaining 
entirely unchanged, the English Establishment, in the com- 
mencement of Baxter's day, was divided between the high- 
churchmen and the Puritans. At the close of his stormy 
career, he saw it still divided ; but the combatants were now 
the high-churchmen and their latitudinarian brethren. At 
the first of his course, the church had been rent between 
order and piety ; at the last, the controversy was between 
order and morality. For, excellent as were many of the 
latitudinarian divines — their Burnets, and their Tillotsons, 
and their Cudworths — they all resorted too often to the 
teachings of the Mr. Worldly Wiseman, the Mr. Legality, 
and that " pretty young man, his son," Mr. Civility, who 
have become known to us in Bunyan's matchless allegory. 
The low-churchman of the first period was then a very dif- 
ferent being from the low-churchman of the second. The 
former quoted the Scriptures, and clung to the Reformers, 
and leaned on their own articles and liturgy ; the latter gave 
to reason undue honor, and relied too blindly on the aid of 
philosophy. The revolution thus accomplished in the church 
is of interest on many accounts. It proves how little power 
may exist in the boasted uniformity of an Establishment and 
its unchangeable formularies. It is a study of interest, too, 
in our days, because the Oxford theology, now so deeply 
agitating the Christians of England, is but a re-appearance 
of those high-church principles that culminated under Laud, 
Parker, and Sancroft, but waning before the superior bright- 
ness of the rival school, had seemed, for almost an entire 
century, lost from the heavens, and vanished not to return. 



198 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER* 

There were other revolutions in this age of change, of 
more genial influence on the cause of freedom and human 
happiness. The most important of these was the discovery 
and enunciation of that great truth, the right of religious 
freedom. Religious toleration, promulgated, and to a cer- 
tain extent practised, under the republic and under Crom- 
well, cruelly restricted under the Stuarts, was finally estab- 
lished by the revolution of 1688. In preparing the way for 
this momentous change, it is the glory of our own denom- 
ination of Christians to have labored most efficiently. They 
contended for what was then deemed a portentous heresy. 
Featly himself, a man of piety, but of bitter zeal, and an 
inveterate opponent of our body, published that the Baptists 
were laboring for the utmost freedom of the press, and for 
unlimited toleration — "damnable doctrines," as he termed 
them, for which he would have them " exterminated from 
the kingdom." 

To the Baptist, then, the age of Baxter is a memorable 
one. The period of the Commonwealth and the Protector- 
ate was the season in which our distinguishing sentiments, 
heretofore the hidden treasures of a few solitary confessors, 
became the property of the people. Through weary years 
they had been held by a few in deep retirement, and at the 
peril of their lives ; now they began rapidly working their 
way and openly into the masses of society. The army that 
won for Cromwell his "crowning mercies," as he called 
those splendid victories which assured the power of the Par- 
liament, became deeply tinged with our views of Christian 
faith and order. They were not, as military bodies have so 
often been, a band of mercenary hirelings, the sweepings of 
society, gleaned from the ale-house and the kennel, or 
snatched from the jail and due to the gallows ; but they 
were composed chiefly of substantial yeomanry, men who 
entered the ranks from principle rather than for gain, and 
whose chief motive for enlistment was, that they believed 
the impending contest one for religious truth and for the 
national liberties — a war in the strictest sense pro arts et 
focis. Clarendon himself allows their superiority, in mor- 
als and character, to the royalist forces. In this army the 
officers were many of them accustomed to preach ; and both 
commanders and privates were continually busied in search- 
ing the Scriptures, in prayers, and in Christian conference. 
The result of the biblicai studies and free communings of 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 199 

these intrepid, high-principled men, was, that they became, 
a large portion of them, Baptists. As to their character, 
the splendid eulogy they won from Milton may counterbal- 
ance the coarse caricatures of poets and novelists, who saw 
them less closely, and disliked their piety too strongly, to 
judge dispassionately their merits. 

Major General Harrison, one of their most distinguished 
leaders, was a Baptist. He was long the bosom friend of 
Cromwell ; and became alienated from him only on discov- 
ering that the Protector sought triumph, not so much for 
principle as for his own personal aggrandizement. Favor- 
able to liberty, and inaccessible to flattering promises of 
power, he became the object of suspicion to Cromwell, ivho 
again and again threw him into prison. On the return of 
the Stuarts, his share in the death of Charles I., among 
whose judges he had sat, brought him to the scaffold ; where 
his gallant bearing and pious triumph formed a close not un- 
suitable to the career he had run. Others of the king's judges, 
and of the eminent officers of the army, belonged to the same 
communion. Some of these sympathized only, it is true, 
with their views of freedom, and seem not to have embraced 
their religious sentiments. Among this class was Ludlow, a 
major-general under Cromwell, an ardent republican, and 
who, being of the regicides, sought a refuge, where he ended 
his days, in Switzerland. He was accounted the head, at one 
time, of the Baptist party in Ireland. Such was their interest, 
that Baxter complains, that many of the soldiers in that king- 
dom became Baptists, as the way to preferment. (Orme, I., 
135.) The chancellor of Ireland under Cromwell was also 
of our body ; Lilburne, one of Cromwell's colonels, and bro- 
ther of the restless and impracticable John Lilburne, was also 
of their number. Overton, the friend of Milton, whom Crom- 
well in 1651 left second in command in Scotland, was also 
ranked as acting with them, as also Okey and Alured. Col. 
Mason, the governor of Jersey, belonged to the Baptists, and 
still others of Cromwell's officers. Penn, one of the admirals 
of the English navy, but now better known as the father of 
the celebrated Quaker, was a Baptist. Indeed, in Cromwell's 
own family their influence was formidable ; and Fleetwood, 
one of his generals and his son-in-law, was accused of leaning 
too much to their interests as a political party.* The English 

* To their influence as a political party, too, Baxter explicitly attributes 
that event which caused shuddering on every throne of Europe, the execu- 



200 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 

matron, whose memoirs form one of the most delightful narra- 
tives of that stirring time, and who in her own character pre- 
sented one of the loveliest specimens of Christian womanhood, 
Lucy Hutchinson, a name of love and admiration wherever 
known, became a Baptist. She did so, together with her 
husband, one of the judges of Charles I. and the governor of 
Nottingham Castle for the Parliament, from the perusal of 
the Scriptures. Of no inferior rank in society, for Hutchin- 
son was a kinsman of the Byrons of Nevvstead, the family 
whence sprung the celebrated poet, their talents, and patriot- 
ism, and Christian graces, and domestic virtues, throw round 
that pair the lustre of a higher nobility than heralds can con- 
fer, and a dignity, compared with which the splendor of 
royalty and the trappings of victory are poor indeed. 

The ministry of our denomination comprised, too, men of 
high character ; some, unhappily, but too much busied in the 
political strifes of the age, but others whose learning and ta- 
lent were brought to bear more exclusively on their appropri- 
ate work. Tombes, the antagonist of Baxter, Bampfield, 
Gosnold, Knolles, Denne and Jessey, all Baptist preachers, 
had held priestly orders in the English established church ; 
Gosnold being one of the most popular ministers in London, 
witli a congregation of 3000 ; and Jessey, a Christian whose 
acquirements and talents, piety and liberality, won him general 
respect. Kiffin, a merchant whose wealth and the excellence 
of his private character had given him influence among the 
princely traders of London, and introduced him to the court 
of the Stuarts, was pastor of a Baptist church in that city. 
Cox, another of our ministers at this time, is said by Baxter 
to have been the son of a bishop ; and Collins, another pastor 
among us, had in his youth been a pupil of Busby. De Veil, 
a convert from Judaism, who had, both with the Romish 
church of France, and in the Episcopal church of England, 
been regarded with much respect, and, in the former, been 
applauded by no less a man than the eloquent and powerful 
Bossuet, became a Baptist preacher, and closed his life and 
labors in the bosom of our communion. Dell, a chaplain of 
Lord Fairfax, and who was, until the restoration, head of 
one of the colleges in the university of Cambridge, was also 
a Baptist minister. Although they deemed literature no 

tion of Charles I., the monarch whom he loved. To them he also traces tho 
invasion of Scotland; in short, the chief events which hurried on the sub- 
version of monarchy and the establishment of a republic. 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 201 

indispensable preparation for the ministry (nor did the church 
of the first centuries), the Baptists under Cromwell and the 
Stuarts, were not destitute of educated men. Out of the 
bounds of England, Vavasor Powell, the Baptist, was evan- 
gelizing Wales with a fearlessness and activity that have won 
him, at times, the title of its apostle ; and on our own shores, 
Roger Williams, another Baptist, was founding Rhode Isl- 
and, giving of the great doctrine gf.religious liberty a visible 
type. Our sentiments were also winning deference from 
minds that were not converted to our views. Milton, with a 
heresy ever to be deprecated and lamented, had adopted most 
fully our principles of baptism. Jeremy Taylor, a name of 
kindred genius, in a work which he intended but as the apol- 
ogy of toleration, stated so strongly the arguments for our dis- 
tinguishing views, that it cost himself and the divines of his 
party much labor to counteract the influence of the reasonings : 
while Barlow, afterwards also a bishop, and celebrated for his 
share in the liberation of Bunyan, addressed to Tombes a let- 
ter strongly in favor of our peculiarities. Such progress in 
reputation and influence was not observed without jealousy. 
Baxter laments that those who, at first, were but a few in the 
city and the army, had within two or three years grown into 
a multitude (Works, xx., 297) ; and asserts that they had so 
far got into power as to seek for dominion, and to expect, 
many of them, that the baptized saints should judge the world, 
and the millennium come. And Baillie, a commissioner from 
Scotland to the Westminster Assembly, a man of strong 
sense, and the ardor of whose piety cannot be questioned, 
though he was a bitter sectarian, complained that the Baptists 
were growing more rapidly than any sect in the land ; while 
Lightfoot's diary of the proceedings of the same Assembly 
proves that similar complaints were brought before that 
venerable body. 

Some would naturally, as in the history of the early Chris^ 
tians, be attracted to a rising sect, who were themselves 
unprincipled men. Lord Howard, the betrayer of the patriot 
Russell, was said to have been, in one period of his shifting 
and reckless course, a Baptist preacher. Another, whose 
exact character it is difficult to ascertain, perverting, as roy- 
alist prejudices did, even his name for the purposes of ridicule, 
Barebones, the speaker of Cromwell's parliament, is said to 
have been a Baptist preacher in London. Others, again, of 
the body were tinged with extravagances ; some joined with 

27 



802 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 

other Christians of the time in the confident expectation of 
what they termed the Fifth Monarchy, Christ's personal 
reign on the earth. In the changes of the day, and they 
were many and wondrous, they saw the tokens of Christ's 
speedy approach to found a universal empire, following in 
the train of the four great monarchies of the prophet's vision. 
It is to the credit of Bunyan, that he discerned and denounced 
the error. Then, as in all ages of the church, it was but too 
common for the interpreters of prophecy to become prophets. 
Others, again, were moved from their steadfastness by Qua- 
kerism, which then commenced its course ; while others 
adopted the views of the Seekers, a party who denied the 
existence of any pure and true church, and were waiting its 
establishment yet to come. In this last class of religionists 
was the younger Sir Henry Vane, the illustrious patriot and 
statesman so beautifully panegyrized in a sonnet of Milton, 
and from his talents dreaded alike by Cromwell and the Stu- 
arts, and the friend of Roger Williams. The founder of 
Rhode Island seems himself, in later life, to have imbibed 
similar views. 

Yet with all these mingling disadvantages, and they are 
but such heresies and scandals as marked the earliest and 
purest times of Christianity, that era in our history is one to 
which we may well turn with devout gratitude, and bless 
God for our fathers. In literature, it is honor enough that 
our sentiments were held by the two men who displayed, 
beyond all comparison, the most creative genius in that age 
of English literature, Milton and Bunyan. In the cause of 
religious and political freedom, it was the lot of our commu- 
nity to labor, none the less effectively because they did it 
obscurely, with Keach, doomed to the pillory, or, like De- 
laune, perishing in the dungeon. The opinions, as to religi- 
ous freedom, then professed by our churches, were not only 
denounced by statesmen as rebellion, but by grave divines 
as the most fearful heresy. Through evil and through good 
report they persevered, until what had clothed them with 
obloquy became, in the hands of later scholars and more prac- 
tised writers, as Locke, a badge of honor and a diadem of 
glory. Nor should it be forgotten, that these views were 
not with them, as with some others, professed in the time of 
persecution, and virtually retracted when power had been 
won. Such was, alas, the course of names no less illustrious 
than StilJinglleet and Taylor. But the day of prosperity and 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 203 

political influence was, with our churches, the day for their 
most earnest dissemination. Their share, in shoring up the 
falling liberties of England, and in infusing new vigor and 
liberality into the constitution of that country, is not yet 
generally acknowledged. It is scarce even known. The 
dominant party in the church and the state, at the restoration, 
became the historians ; and " when the man, and not the 
lion, was thus the painter," it was easy to foretell with what 
party all the virtues, all the talents, and all the triumphs, 
would be found. When our principles shall have won their 
way to more general acceptance, the share of Baptists in the 
achievements of that day will be disinterred, like many 
other forgotten truths, from the ruins of history. Then it 
will, we believe, be found, that while dross, such as has 
alloyed the purest churches in the best ages, may have been 
found in some of our denomination, yet the body was com- 
posed of pure and scriptural Christians, who contended 
manfully, some with bitter sufferings, for the rights of con- 
science, and the truth as it is in Jesus : that to them English 
liberty owes a debt it has never acknowledged ; and that 
amongst them Christian freedom found its earliest and some 
of its stanchest, its most consistent, and its most disinterested 
champions. Had they continued ascending the heights of 
political influence, it had been perhaps disastrous to their 
spiritual interests ; for when did the disciples of Christ long 
enjoy power or prosperity, without some deterioration of 
their graces? He who, as we maybe allowed to hope, loved 
them with an everlasting love, and watched over their wel- 
fare with a sleepless care, threw them back, in the subse- 
quent convulsions of the age, into the obscure and lowly 
stations of life, because in such scenes he had himself de- 
lighted to walk, and in these retired paths it has ever been 
his wont to lead his flock. 

We may have seemed to wander far from our topic ; but 
the digression may be forgiven, as illustrating the circum- 
stances of Baxter's time, and the influences to which he 
w T ith others was subjected ; the conflicting tides along which 
he floated, or which he strenuously buffeted ; while showing 
also why to the Baptist his age must be ever full of interest. 
Let us pass to consider the man himself. 

Born in the year 1615, of a father who was a respectable 
freeholder, Baxter found in the piety of home some counter- 
poise to the profanity of the neighborhood, and the negligence 



204 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 

and dissoluteness that infested even the pulpits of the sur- 
rounding district. Although he showed much of serious- 
ness in early life, reproving the sins of other children, ho 
did not believe himself converted until attaining the age of 
fifteen ; when books, to which he elsewhere declares he 
owes the chief advantages of his life, fixed his impressions. 
The work of a Jesuit, revised by a Puritan, was the first of 
these treatises ; and the writings also of Sibbes greatly ben- 
efited him. His early education was irregular ; and, though 
afterwards prepared for the university, he never entered it, 
owing his chief attainments to the resolute application of 
later years. Like his contemporary, Bunyan, he met, in his 
opening course as a Christian, one of the severest of trials, 
in the apostacy of an intimate friend, who sank back into 
irreligion, and became an open mocker of that piety he had 
once seemed to exemplify. Just at the date of his conver- 
sion, he was offered an introduction at court ; but soon for- 
sook an atmosphere little congenial to his feelings. Failing 
health and the expectation of early death, gave to all the 
studies in which he now plunged a practical tendency. It 
is the snare, even of the best conducted and best guarded 
forms of theological education, that the scholar may insen- 
sibly learn to fix his mind but on the theory of religion, and, 
losing its spirit, forfeit its blessings. The man who sees the 
grave at his feet is less likely thus to err. Death in near 
view gave to Baxter a conscientiousness in the selection of 
his themes of study, and a devout earnestness in their med- 
itation. Redemption and judgment were not mere theories 
to a man who looked soon to swell the harpings of the ran- 
somed, or the howlings of the lost. From the age of twen- 
ty-one to twenty-three, he hardly expected to survive a 
single year. Still, anxious to employ the little fragment of 
time that might remain, he entered the ministry, receiving 
Episcopal ordination. It was afterwards his regret, that he 
had not duly studied the question of Episcopacy. His first 
labors were at Dudley, where, for a year, he was also the 
schoolmaster, and where his studies began to incline him to 
Nonconformity. New oaths, imposed on the clergy to re- 
press the spirit of Puritanism, yet more revolted him. At 
Bridgnorth he labored with applause, but without fruit, 
among a people already hardened by a faithful ministry, that 
had not profited them. He soon became, however, lecturer 
and curate at Kidderminster, with a people rude and ignorant ; 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 205 

but whom he preferred, from a resolution he had made 
never to settle with a people whose conscience had been 
once hardened under an awakening ministry. In this field 
he labored at first but two years, when the civil war broke 
out, and the more disorderly of his hearers, incensed against 
him for his faithfulness, made his stay at Kidderminster 
dangerous ; for, from the basest slanders, they proceeded 
actually to attempt his life. Thus driven from a station which 
was yet to become memorable as the parish of Baxter, he 
labored for two years in Coventry, receiving but a bare sup- 
port. Here he disputed strenuously against the Baptists, 
then making proselytes. Cox, his antagonist, and whom 
Baxter describes as no contemptible scholar, and as the son 
of a bishop, was thrown into prison, though not with the will 
of Baxter. The result of this unhappy appeal to that royal 
syllogism, the argument from compulsion, was the planting 
of a Baptist church at Coventry, which has continued to our 
times. Baxter now consulted with his brethren in the min- 
istry as to his entering the army, there to counteract the 
sectarian influence that was rapidly triumphing. His zeal, 
and piety, and popular eloquence, and powers of disputation, 
seem to have made him already eminent. By the advice of 
his friends, he became a chaplain in the regiment of Col. 
Whalley, a kinsman of Cromwell, one of the judges on the 
trial of the king, and the same whose flight to our country, 
and concealment here, forms one of the most romantic inci- 
dents in the early history of New England. Cromwell, who 
knew Baxter's dislike to his views of general toleration, now 
looked coolly on the man whom he had once admired, and 
had invited in earlier years to become the chaplain of his 
own regiment. At the close of the war, Baxter returned 
again to his beloved Kidderminster, where he remained now 
about fourteen years ; and, by a series of pastoral labors of 
surpassing faithfulness, made the connection between his 
own name and the parish an inseparable one in the memory 
of the church. Such may be the mighty effects of a few 
years in the career of a zealous pastor ; for the whole term 
spent by Baxter in this, the vineyard of his affections, com- 
prised little more than a fifth of his lifetime. His memory 
is yet most fragrant there, after the lapse of more than a 
century ; and the fruits of his influence are said to be yet 
traceable. He had found the spot a moral waste. He toil- 
ed, prayed, wept, gave and endured, until the wilderness 



206 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 

blossomed as the garden of the Lord. Profanity and irreli- 
gion possessed it at his first entrance. In the civil wars, how- 
ever, the same brutish herd that had driven their pastor from 
his post, nearly all perished ; and, on his restoration to his 
parish, these former obstacles were found to have disap- 
peared. He had at first found scarce a family in an entire 
street, who were accustomed to the regular worship of God 
in the home. Ere he left, there were many streets in which 
not one family was without its altar ; and the passing stran- 
ger heard the chorus of prayer and praise swelling on either 
hand, as he walked past the threshold. In a parish of eight 
hundred families, numbering four thousand souls, his com- 
municants became in number six hundred; of whom thee 
w r ere, he declared, scarce twelve, of whose conversion he 
had not good hope. Incessant and systematic visitation, and 
the catechetical instruction of every family, whatever their 
ages, were united to much earnest preaching. His labors 
were amazing. He gave himself to the ministry of the word, 
to prayer, and to fasting. In addition, Baxter ministered 
freely to the wants of the poor among his flock from his own 
substance ; while of his small stipend, through his lenity in 
exacting his legal dues, not one half ever reached his hands. 
He educated, too, poorer children ; and some, having been 
thus brought by him through the university, entered for 
themselves upon the ministry. All this was not enough to 
satisfy his heart of fire and occupy his iron diligence. For 
the space of five or six years he was the physician of his 
flock, not to eke out by its revenues a scanty stipend, but 
from mere kindness ; for his advice and aid were alike with- 
out charge. When he looked round upon his congregation, 
he saw in the greater part those who had owed health, and 
many of them life, to his assistance. This could not but 
endear him to the most insensible. He was, amid all this, 
a writer ; and of each of his smaller works, gave one copy 
to every family of his charge ; while each poor household, 
unable themselves to obtain it, he supplied with a Bible. 
Nor did he limit his labors to these bounds. He preached 
with the neighboring ministers in surrounding districts : and> 
as an author, he became famous through the land ; while 
his example of pastoral fidelity and success excited many to 
admire, and some to imitate, his methods. Such was Rich- 
ard Baxter amid his people ; and, had his infirmities been 
both more, and more aggravated than they were, devotedness 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 207 

so rare must win from every member of the true church, 
whatever his name among men, an earnest and emphatic 
blessing. God grant to every evangelical community many 
in his likeness. 

During the Protectorate, Baxter never disguised his ad- 
herence to the royal family ; preached against Cromwell ; 
and, when once admitted to an interview with the man whose 
very name made Mazarine to turn pale, and whose power 
awed all Europe, Baxter told the Protector, with his usual 
intrepidity, that the people of England believed their ancient 
monarchy a blessing ; nor did they know what they had 
done to forfeit its advantages. When the Restoration was 
now concerted, Baxter was selected to preach before the 
Parliament, when preparing for the act. Upon the return 
of Charles II., he was appointed a chaplain to the king, and 
was offered a mitre in the establishment, if he would con- 
form. But the Episcopal crozier and stall had no tempta- 
tion to such a spirit. He asked but for the privilege of re- 
turning to his beloved Kidderminster ; and when this was 
denied, sued for permission to labor there without a stipend. 
But it was in vain ; and this man, whose loyalty had been 
so eminent, was permitted to preach but twice or thrice to 
these, his attached and beloved flock. Returning now to 
London, he continued to preach as he obtained opportu- 
nity. On St. Bartholomew's day, the decree of stern ex- 
clusion drove from the communion of the Established Church 
two thousand of her worthiest and ablest ministers. 

Their altars they forego, their homes they quit, 

Fields which they loved and paths they daily trod, 

And cast the future upon Providence. Wordsworth. 

Among these confessors, Baxter, the man who had re- 
jected a bishopric for conscience' sake, was found abandon- 
ing, what he prized far more highly, the liberty of preaching 
the gospel. Removed to London, he still continued to 
publish his message as a Christian minister, amid continual 
risks and vexations, watched by informers, and accused of 
sedition. Five times in fifteen years thrown into prison, his 
goods distrained, and driven from one residence to another, 
amid weakness, and pain, and persecution, Baxter toiled on, 
From his books, of which he says in language of simple 
pathos, there was little" he valued more upon earth, he was 
separated. Compelled first to conceal, and afterwards to sell 



208 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 

them, he describes himself as being for twelve years driven 
more than one hundred miles from his library. He seemed 
to regret it, even when drawing near the end, to use his own 
words, " of that life that needeth books." The times in 
which he lived were full of gloomy omens. A dissolute 
court, where the royal mistresses rioted in scenes of the most 
aggravated profusion and profligacy ; a king who, while 
sworn to guard the liberties of Britain, was receiving the pay 
of France, and while presiding at the head of a Protestant 
establishment, was, in truth, long since united to the Romish 
church ; a divided cabinet, and a persecuting hierarchy, and a 
most debauched nobility, were not the only evils that sadden- 
ed the heart of the Christian patriot. The judgments of God, 
signal and wide spread, had fallen on the chief city of the 
empire ; and plague and fire seemed commissioned to punish 
what could not be reformed. When a measure of liberty 
was given, Baxter procured a meeting-house ; but was again 
sued, fined and cast into prison. In the reign of James II., 
he was selected as a great Nonconformist leader, to become 
the more eminent victim, and an example of terror to the 
land. His Notes on the New Testament were searched for 
passages to which a seditious tendency might be imputed. 
Bitter might well be the language in which he there occa- 
sionally spoke of Christian dignitaries, thus restricting from 
their beloved work men, their equals in talent, and often far 
their superiors in piety and usefulness. He was brought 
before the inhuman Jeffreys, one of the most brutal judges 
that ever disgraced the English bench, even in that day of 
judicial corruption ; a man of coarse strength of mind, the 
vigorous and unscrupulous tool of tyranny. Threatened and 
maligned with the coarsest virulence, he was sentenced to a 
heavy fine ; the infuriated Jeffreys regretting only that it was 
not in his power to hang him. Baxter now spent about two 
years in prison; but amid sickness and pain, and the gather- 
ing evils of age, Baxter was a laborer still, and still cheerful. 
" What could I desire more of God," said he to a friend, 
" than having served him to my utmost, now to suffer for 
him?" A change in the measures of the court, opened his 
prison doors. He lived to see the revolution, and survived 
that day of deliverance to the Nonconformist churches three 
years ; having reached, through sufferings, perils and toils, 
the age of seventy-six. 

Amid the anguish of complicated disorders, his death-bed 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 209 

was a scene of serene triumph. When asked in his latter 
days, as his strength waned and the hour of his dismission 
drew nigh, how he found himself, his usual reply was, " almost 
well." He had lived the theme of many tongues: min- 
gled admiration, contempt, hate, reverence and affection, 
were lavished upon him. But multitudes, even of other 
communions, acknowledged his rare worth. Hale, the bright- 
est name in the records of the English Themis, was his friend, 
scarce refraining from tears when told of his imprisonment ; 
and bequeathing to him a legacy, trivial in amount, but valu- 
able, as the expression of esteem and love, from such a man. 
Usher, the most learned and pious prelate of his age, it was, 
that urged Baxter to write the Call to the Unconverted. 
"Wilkins, also of the Episcopal bench, declared that had 
Baxter lived in primitive times, he would have been a father 
of the church ; and that it was glory enough for one age to 
have produced such a man. Boyle, the devoutest, as he was 
among the greatest of English philosophers, said of him, 
that he was better fitted than any man of that age to be a 
casuist ; for he feared no man's displeasure, and sought no 
man's preferment. And Barrow, whose own powers as a 
reasoner and prejudices as a churchman give double force to 
his testimony, declared of him that his practical writings 
were never mended, and his controversial ones seldom con- 
futed. 

It will be seen that his life was no long dream of lettered 
ease, spent amid the quiet of a settled home, and all the aids 
of academic retirement. His was a troubled course ; and, 
in the agitations of a changeful time, when the foundations 
of many generations were upheaved by the rising tide of 
revolution, when every day bore the news of recent, or the 
omen of coming change, busiest among the busy, Baxter 
seemed the sworn foe of repose ; and, in the spirit of old 
Arnauld, the great champion of Jansenism, to have ex- 
claimed, " Shall we not have all eternity to rest in?" Ac- 
tive by constitution, connected with the political parties in 
power, sometimes their adviser, more often their victim, 
Baxter was yet, with these entangling engagements about 
him, the diligent student and the faithful pastor. He was, 
too, a most voluminous writer. His practical writings alone 
fill twenty volumes. Were his controversial and miscella- 
neous productions added, the collection would extend to 
sixty goodly octavos. Many a minister, we fear, lives and 

28 



210 I'IFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 

dies without reading as many pages as Baxter wrote, As a 
casuist, he was among the most renowned of the age. For 
seven years he had stood in doubt of his own salvation 
(xxiii., p. 1, and xvii., p. 276) ; and his anxious scrutiny of 
his heart and way, had qualified him to guide others. His 
Christian Directory remains yet, a work of great value, enter- 
ing into religious duties with a minuteness of detail, a fulness 
of illustration, and a niceness of discrimination, that leave the 
reader astonished at the copious resources of his mind. As 
a controversialist, his pen had both power and weight; and, 
into all the leading questions of the age, he brought a strength 
of logic, and a scholastic acuteness, that made him to the most 
doughty of polemics no contemptible foe. Yet withal he was 
earnest for conciliation among Christians, anxious to find a 
middle way for contending theologians, and to effect a union 
among jarring sects ; declaring often that he would as freely 
be a martyr for charity, as for any article in the creed. He 
attempted poetry, not that he sought fame, or had studied 
harmony ; but because he loved the songs of the sanctuary, 
declaring that he knew no better image of heaven, than a 
whole congregation heartily singing the praises of God ; 
because, too, he loved God with an ardent affection, and his 
feelings found natural vent in verse more pious than poetical. 
Two of his lines have, however, gained a currency, they are 
likely never to lose. They are those in which he describes 
himself, 

"Preaching as if I ne'er should preach again, 
And as a dying man to dying men." 

Blessed the pulpit where this motto shines : to the world it 
will be as an echo of Mount Sinai ; .to the church, a tower 
on the heights of Mount Zion. 

But the chief distinction of Baxter in authorship is as a 
practical writer. His topics were themes of universal con- 
cernment, such as he advises the youthful minister to select 
for his sermons ; themes drawn from the creed, the com- 
mandments, and the Lord's prayer ; or, as he happily ex- 
pressed it, the things to be believed, to be done, and to be 
desired. Such are the subjects that must " come home to 
men's business and bosoms." Some of these compositions 
stand yet unrivalled for energy and urgency. The writer 
hurls himself against the heart of the reader with the force 
and directness of a battering-ram. Yet some were written 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 211 

under circumstances that would have sentenced others to 
helpless inactivity, and been pleaded as reasons sufficient for 
drawling out a life without effort or purpose. The Saints' 
Everlasting Rest was the work of the last months in his 
military career ; with the noise of camps yet in his ears, 
separated from all his books, his health apparently fast failing, 
and eternity rising before him. But if ordinary helps were 
wanting, other and higher aid was not withheld. The church 
has few volumes written like that, as on the very summit of 
the delectable mountains, where the eye could trace the 
outlines of the New Jerusalem, and the ear already caught 
the thunder of the harpings of its many harpers. Fame or 
protit was not the object of his authorship. His course 
shows the sincerity of a declaration prefixed to one of his 
sermons, that he would rather see his books carried in ped- 
lars' packs to the fairs and markets of the country, than 
standing on the shelves of the rich man's library. 

As a preacher and pastor, it is scarcely possible for the 
youthful pastor to select a higher model in the modern church. 
His published works caused Doddridge to call him the 
Demosthenes of the English pulpit. There is much in his 
writings to redeem the epithet from extravagance, whether 
we look to the vigorous simplicity of style, their burning 
logic, set on fire by strong passion, his sustained enthusiasm, 
or the tremendous iterations of his earnestness in dealing 
with the heart. Before Cromwell or the national parliament, 
the judges at their circuit, or the simple tradesman of his 
own Kidderminster, he seemed alike raised above all fear 
of man; elevated by the responsibility of his office and the 
view of his final audit at the bar of Christ, to a point, where 
the voice of fame died away on the ear, and the gauds and 
toys of earth showed in their native littleness. He was not 
only in request as a preacher, but as a disputant, holding 
public conferences with our own denomination, with the 
Quakers, and with bishops of the Establishment. But it is 
as a pastor, that the lesson of his life has its chief value. He 
brought his parish into a regular system of visitation ; himself 
and his assistant visiting fourteen families previously desig- 
nated, in each week, and devoting, every week, two entire 
days to the employment. Prolonged conversation with each 
individual, and the catechetical instruction of the whole fa- 
mily, were the exercises in which the time was spent. He 
counted his visitations greater labor, than his preparations 



212 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 

for the pulpit. Their effects were remarkable. To the 
young he showed special care. It was a favorite sentiment 
with him, that, were Christian parents but faithful to their 
duties, preaching would remain no longer the chief instrument 
of conversion. He saw the benefits of toil bestowed upon 
children, in its reaction upon the parents. Some of his 
older parishioners, long incorrigible and insensible, were 
hopefully converted at the age, in some cases, even of eighty, 
in consequence of beholding the effects of piety in their chil- 
dren and grandchildren. In the Reformed Pastor he has 
urged the duties of the ministry with such power, that some 
theological instructors have recommended a yearly perusal 
of the work to every one occupying or expecting to fill the 
ministerial office. 

Another memorable feature in his history is the manner in 
which he threw his mind into various channels without dissi- 
pating its strength. The peculiar circumstances of our age 
seem often to require this of pastors. Many and dissimilar em- 
ployments must be mingled. Was it that his devotion gave 
tone and tension to his mind, such as no other discipline than 
that of the closet could have supplied, and that, basking on 
the loftiest heights of divine meditation, he came down to 
the strifes and toils of the plain beneath with a strength which 
could be obtained only in this near approach to the throne, 
or in whatever mode we account for it, his name stands high 
among the few, who, in varied fields, have in most been 
eminent, and in none contemptible. Now engaged in pre- 
paring for the nursery the " Mother's Catechism," or putting 
on the shelf of the cottager the " Poor Man's Family Book," 
he was seen anon issuing some ponderous tome of theology 
or polemics, where the acuteness of a schoolman was sustain- 
ed with no despicable stores of knowledge, and no vulgar 
eloquence. He blended qualities of mind and heart often 
deemed incompatible, because so seldom found in union. 
With much metaphysical subtlety, he used the simplest and 
most popular language, and retained his power of holding an 
audience spell-bound by appeals of stirring vigor and familiar 
illustrations. Bunyan, coming up from the shop, and the 
highway, and the market-place, into the pulpit, could not 
preach more plainly, or draw to his aid illustrations more apt 
or homely. Public spirit in him was united with personal 
watchfulness ; and his continual labors for others had not 
relaxed his attention to his own heart and way. The life of 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. • 213 

the statesman, the traveller, and the merchant, is sometimes 
thought to excuse, from its peculiar embarrassments, a lower 
standard of holiness in the Christian who occupies such a 
place in society. But Baxter's cares, and correspondence, 
and labors, might have wearied many a merchant, and seemed 
too intricate for a cabinet minister, while oft he found himself 
with no certain dwelling-place, travelling perforce now to 
regain health, and now to escape persecution; yet the 
retirement of the closet and the culture of the heart seem 
never neglected. He was like Daniel, who, with the cares 
of an empire resting on his shoulders, was still, in his cham- 
ber, the man greatly beloved of Heaven; and, like Nehemiah, 
when amid the luxury and pomp and honor of his station, 
his eye saw through the gilded lattices of Shushan, not the 
tufted palm, or the splendid pillar, or the fragrant garden, 
but one object still arose, dark and distant before his eye, 
the blackened walls of the distant Jerusalem. 

It enhances yet more the value of his example and its 
singularity, that all these were the doings of an invalid. He 
belonged to that class from which some would expect little 
of energy or achievement, whose conversation is in some 
cases only of still recurring ailments, and their care is still 
some new remedy for the old disease. Scarce could this 
class produce, from their most extreme cases, one whose 
bodily disorders were so numerous, distressing and long 
continued, as the complicated maladies that had met in the 
shattered tabernacle which housed the spirit of Baxter. Like 
his illustrious contemporary, when remembering his blind- 
ness, he 

" Bates not a jot of heart or hope, but still 
Bears up and steers right onward." — Milton. 

Entering the ministry with what would now be termed the 
symptoms of a confirmed consumption, Baxter battled right 
manfully his way through languor and pain, until he had 
passed the usual bound of threescore years and ten, allotted to 
our stay on the earth. When others would have quitted the 
field to occupy the hospital, and when many would have dwin- 
dled away into shivering and selfish valetudinarians, the im- 
pulse of high conscientiousness and sustaining faith carried 
this man on, to the last, an efficient laborer. And while, with 
Paul, he knew what it was to be "in deaths oft," with the 
apostle, also, could he claim to be " in labors more abundant, '^ 



214 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 

He had his errors. Many he detected, and, like Augustine i 
in all candor, retracted. Others he knew not until he reach- 
ed that land where all the followers of Christ will have so 
much to learn, as well as so much to enjoy. Among the 
imperfections of this excellent man, some may be palliated 
as the result of natural temperament or bodily weakness. 
Of ardent and irritable character, his vehemence became at 
times undue severity. His prejudices were strong, and his 
feelings perhaps often tinged with bitterness from the nuste- 
rity of his life and his frequent sicknesses. With great 
metaphysical acuteness he refined and distinguished, until 
truth was perplexed, and error found shelter under heaps of 
ingenious distinctions. He confessed that he had an early 
and strong love of controversy, which he sought to restrain. 
But, even in his attempts to end, he sometimes created dis- 
putes, and added but a new term to the watchwords of theo- 
logical strife already too numerous. His middle path became 
but the means of exciting new contentions, or forming one 
more sect. Thus Baxterianism, as others have called it, or 
the system by which he would harmonize the Calvinist and 
the Arminian, became, in his own and the subsequent gene- 
ration, but the occasion of a new and embittered controversy. 
Hence he complained, late in life, that he had been making 
his bare hand a wedge to part the gnarly oaks of controversy, 
and the result was, where he would have separated contend- 
ing parties, they closed upon the hand of the peace-maker ; 
united in endeavoring to crush it, if disunited in all else. 
Writing rapidly and on every theme, his expressions could 
not always have been duly weighed, and often clashed 
apparently with each other. This was a charge of his ene- 
mies, and was wittily urged against him by L'Estrange, who 
compiled what he supposed contradictions from Baxter's 
numerous books, and entitled the work, "The Casuist un- 
cased, or a dialogue betwixt Richard and Baxter, with a 
moderator between for quietness' sake." He was also 
accused of egotism ; and his great contemporary, Owen, has 
broadly charged him with this fault. But it seems rather the 
childlike openness of a mind that thought aloud, and knew no 
disguises, than the fruit of conceit. A graver fault was his 
dislike of toleration. It was, however, the fault of his age 
and his sect ; for the Presbyterian body to which he belonged, 
with all their excellences, and they were many and rare, 
were, as a denomination, the zealous opponents of religious 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 215 

freedom, and incurred for this, as for other causes, the indig- 
nant satire of the muse of Milton. 

In this and other questions, nothing is more common, yet 
nothing more unjust, than to try the men of former ages by 
the light of our own times. But the men of that day rea- 
soned thus. Every man is bound to use his influence in the 
extension of religion. He is not the less bound to do so, 
because he wears a crown. In what way could a king pat- 
ronize, but by paying, its ministry, and guarding its creed. 
They read, too, in the Scriptures that kings were to be the 
nursing-fathers of the church ; and seeing, in the Jewish 
dispensation, that God had united the civil and religious 
polity of his own people, Scripture and reason seemed to 
unite in requiring that the state should become the patron of 
the church. In addition, the practice of ages was with the 
advocates of these views. Where were the people, Christian 
or heathen, in whom the civil government and the priesthood 
did not recognize a mutual dependence, each on the other, 
and lend alternate aid ? They who forget how deeply these 
prejudices were imbedded in the minds of mankind, and who 
condemn the intolerance of the Puritans without mercy, act 
unjustly ; and if Baptists, are unjust also to the merit of their 
own fathers, whose honor, received from God, it was to 
discover a truth long forgotten, and on its reappearance 
universally suspected ; and one too, not at first sight so ob- 
vious, but that much might be plausibly urged against it. 

On the other hand, some few among the Baptists of the 
continent and England early held that all magistracy was 
sinful ; that no Christian could accept it. They argued from 
the declaration of him who said, " My kingdom is not of 
this world ;" and especially they relied on a perverse inter- 
pretation of that Scripture still so often misunderstood — like 
some parts of the ocean, beautifully clear, yet unfathomably 
deep — the Sermon on the Mount. These arrived at a true 
result, that religion was not to be the creature of the state ; 
but it was by a most erroneous process. The argument was 
that all states and governments were unlawful. As civil 
government was itself sin, Christ could not accept Belial as a 
coadjutor, nor the church the aid of the civil power. This 
was liberty, blundered upon by the gropings of falsehood. 
Others of the Baptists saw the truth, that civil magistracy 
was an ordinance of God, not only allowable, but necessary 
and most righteous, if justly administered. But they saw, 



216 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 

also, that the Saviour's rule differed from that of earthly 
princes in its subjects and in its laws ; in short, in its entire 
genius. They declared that to blend the two was tyranny 
against man, and it was treason against God. When this 
bold truth burst to light from the lowly walks of society, its 
effect was most startling. Like other truths, it carried to 
many minds its own evidence. But others saw in it the seed 
of all license, the subversion of all morality, the setting up 
in the state of a government without God, and in the church 
the desertion of truth to perish, an unregarded stranger in 
the streets. Their very piety made them the more strenuous 
in opposition ; and the more they dreaded and abhorred the 
heresies to which they supposed it would give universal 
currency, the more did they labor, and argue, and pray 
against an unlimited toleration. We may see, their error, 
and yet respect, and even revere their motives. Of this 
character was the holy man who gives occasion to these 
remarks. Seeing the Baptists in an error, as he deemed it, 
and especially zealous in breaking an inlet for all errors, he 
did perhaps, in some of his works, intemperately excite the 
magistrate against them. But, in later years, we rejoice to 
believe, that further acquaintance with some of their excel- 
lent leaders had weakened his prejudices; and, towards the 
close of his course, he was in favor of a very restricted tol- 
eration for all evangelical sects, in which he would now in- 
clude even the Baptists. It was not, however, until he en- 
tered heaven, that he understood that great truth — to him 
so hard, to us so simple — that Christ, the potentate of the 
universe, cannot be the stipendiary of any earthly kingling ; 
and that the state, which assumes to patronize Christianity, 
corrupts it. 

It were an interesting task to remember and compare some 
of the guiding spirits of the age in which he lived, with Bax- 
ter. He brought not the rich erudition of many of his coe- 
vals to the study of the Bible. He could not boast the 
powers of Chillingworth as a reasoner ; he did not emulate, 
and perhaps from conscience would not have used, the gor- 
geous imagery of Jeremy Taylor. Owen was a sounder 
theologian, and Howe had more both of the sublime and the 
profound in his writings. Yet in how many points did all 
these men stand far behind the pastor of Kidderminster ! 
In style, Barrow was not more nervous than he, nor was 
Tillotson more clear on any practical theme, Milton probably 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 217 

disliked his stern Presbyterianism ; and he had probably as 
little taste as the mass of the nation in that age for the mag- 
nificence of Milton's epic. He would have turned in prefer- 
ence to his own favorite George Herbert, with quaintnesses 
innumerable, but withal, a deep, heart-felt piety, that would 
have commended to Baxter the verses of a bell-man. With 
the saintly Leighton he seems not to have met : their paths 
did not cross, until both had terminated in heaven. Of 
Bunyan we have met no mention in his writings , nor does 
the honest pastor of Bedford, in any of his works, refer to 
Richard Baxter. Both served God zealously and with every 
faculty. Both contended earnestly for a union among 
Christians, more desirable than practicable, and sought it by 
methods that were unwise. Both were confessors for truth 
in the dungeon ; and, had persecution led them to the stake, 
neither would have faltered before the terrors of a fiery 
martyrdom. In the union of strong reasoning powers with 
an active imagination, the tinker of Elstow more nearly ap- 
proached Baxter than might at first have seemed probable. 
And in Bunyan 's sermons, there is a force of homely illus- 
tration, a mastery of the vernacular English, and a terrific 
closeness and pungency in dealing with the sinner's con- 
science, as well as a high standard of Christian morality urged 
upon the professed disciple, reminding any reader of Baxter's 
best works. Baxter might have learned to advantage from 
his humble contemporary to insist more than he did on the 
doctrines of grace, as the only ground of the sinner's hope, 
and the grand motives to a Christian practice. Both have 
met in heaven, and rejoice we doubt not, continually in the 
multitudes whom their labors that survived them have already 
drawn, and are each day attracting thither, to swell the train 
of the ransomed, and the glories of the Redeemer. 

Contrasted with the greatness of this world, how does the 
character of Baxter rise and tower in surpassing majesty, 
whether we consider the purity of his motives, or the high 
excellence of his private life, the nature of the influence he 
exerts, the labors accomplished by him, or the sufferings by 
which he was perfected. Voltaire, born the year after Bax- 
ter's death, resembled him in the quenchless fervor of his 
spirit, his promptitude and his stirring restlessness, the ver- 
satility of his powers, and their continuous exercise through 
a long life. But when the effects produced on the human 
character, and on the happiness of the individual, and the 

29 



218 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 






family, and the nation, by the philosopher of Ferney, and 
the Kidderminster pastor, are brought into view together, 
how is the lustre of infidel genius rebuked ! The gigantic 
sceptic dwindles and wilts before the holiness that inspired 
the genius of Baxter, like Satan, when touched by the spear 
of Ithuriel, cowering in deformity and shame. To sneer, to 
chatter, and to mock, were the favorite employments of the 
one, flinging filth and breathing venom on every side. The 
other was, indeed, imperfect ; but still it is seen, that the 
mind which was in him was the mind that was in Christ : 
and beneficence, and truth, and purity, piety toward God, 
and justice and mercy toward mankind, streamed from his 
heart, his lips, and his eyes, over a world that was not wor- 
thy of him. 

Imagination might ask, what would have been the cho- 
sen pursuits of such a spirit as Baxter's, had his lot been 
cast in our times, and his home been fixed upon these western 
shores. Would he have given his life to the heathen ? He 
loved them. And while Owen, his gifted compeer, thought 
it not the duty of the church to undertake missions to the 
heathen without some new call from heaven, Baxter judged 
more rightly, that the only impediment was the want of 
the requisite love and faith in the church. When silenced 
in England, he declared that years and the difficulties of a 
new language only prevented him from going to preach 
Christ to idolaters. We may well suppose, that, in whatever 
field he had been fixed, he would have thrown the whole 
weight of his energy into the missionary enterprise. In the 
labors of the Tract and Bible Society, he had within his 
parochial limits anticipated the schemes of our day. But 
with the widening facilities now afforded for the work, how 
efficient might he have been, and how effective a writer of 
tracts was Baxter qualified to become. And had he enjoyed 
the light of those truths, now the common heritage of the 
age, but, then, hidden from some of the ablest and best of 
mankind — had he known the powers of an emancipated 
church — had he understood the sanctity of conscience, how 
much of misspent labor might have been preserved for wiser 
nses. But here as elsewhere, God, who would not have the 
fathers perfect without us, had reserved for us some better 
thing. Rich is our inheritance. And did Richard Baxter 
see as we do, a country opening before him, not a narrow 
and rock-bound isle, but a massy continent, soon to be belted 



LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 219 

by our republic — did he behold what our eyes witness, the 
railroad and the canal, shooting their lines of electrical com- 
munication across the face of our broad territory — did he see 
steam yoking itself to the chariot, and urging the vessel with 
a speed that leaves the wildest hopes of early projectors 
lagging far behind — and did he see our language, his own 
nervous and masculine English, spreading itself not only 
through Britain and America, but to their colonies and con- 
nections on every shore, would he not have deemed these 
redoubled opportunities of influence a call to yet redoubled 
zeal ? Yet more, had he seen travel and history bringing 
every day new testimonies to swell the growing mass of 
prophesies accomplished, and to heighten and strengthen the 
walls of Christian evidence — did he hear from the southern 
seas, then unknown, the cry of nations turning from the idols 
of their fathers, would not even his zeal have received a new 
impulse, and the trumpet at his lips have blown a blast 
waxing yet louder and louder ? Whatever was his duty, is 
not the less ours. The contemplation of such an example 
reproves us all. But the Master's promised presence and 
the inexhaustible graces of that Spirit which has been the 
Teacher of the church, and her teachers in all ages, these 
may well stimulate to the loftiest aims, and revive the falter- 
ing hopes of the faintest heart. Let us not then, in beholding 
the graces that have adorned the former servants of our 
common Lord, be ready to deem all emulation impossible. 
In regarding the character and achievements of Baxter, we 
may not hope to possess his singular talents ; but all may 
imitate his holiness, his zeal, his resolute patience, his dili- 
gence, and his flaming charity. And if ever the standard 
seem too elevated, and our eyes are dazzled as we look at 
its tall summit, bright with heaven's own light, let us remem- 
ber, that even this does not reach the full height of our 
privileges and our obligations. For it was no disputable 
authority that spake, and in no dubious language, when the 
Lawgiver and the Redeemer proclaimed it as the rule of his 
household, "Be ye perfect, as your Father which is in heaven 
is perfect." 






CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 

"And he said unto them. Let us go into the next towns, that 1 
may preach there also .* for therefore came i forth. — mark i. 38. 

It is ever delightful to the Christian, that he can trace, in 
the way along which he journeys, the footsteps of his Sa- 
viour preceding him. The labors, the sorrows and the joys 
of his course all become hallowed, when it is seen that the 
Master has first partaken of them. The cup of affliction is 
less distasteful to the believer, because our Lord has himself 
drunk of its bitterness, and left on the brim a lingering fra- 
grance. In prayer, he approaches to God with greater con- 
fidence, because he names as his intercessor one who him- 
self prayed while upon earth, with strong crying and tears, 
watched all night in supplication on the lone mountain side, and 
bowed to pray, beneath the olives of Gethsemane, with the 
bloody dews of anguish on his brow. And the preaching of 
the word derives its highest glory from the fact, that He 
who descended into the world to become its ransom, was 
himself a minister of that Gospel he commissioned others to 
preach. In the words before us we have Christ's own testi- 
mony, that the very purpose of his coming was to preach 
from town to town of his native land. Jesus Christ was, 
therefore, a Home Missionary. To this end, blessed Savi- 
our, "earnest thou forth." To thy servants, who have at 
this time for the like purpose gathered themselves together, 
wilt thou not then give thy presence and favor, Head of thy 
Church as thou art, Master of all her assemblies, and the 
only effectual teacher of all her pastors and evangelists? 

Aid me, my brethren, with your prayers, while from these 
words I would commend to your notice the resemblance 

BETWEEN YOUR OWN LABORS, AND THE PERSONAL MINIS- 
TRY of your Lord and Saviour as performed in the 



CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 221 

field of Home Missions ; and while I urge the conse- 
quent DUTY OF THE CHURCH TO CONTINUE AND ABOUND 
IN THE LIKE GOOD WORK. 

I. The title of Missionary denotes, as you know, one sent 
forth, and especially belongs to one whose errand it is to 
propagate religion. You need not to be reminded how often 
Christ announced to his hostile countrymen the fact, that he 
was sent from God, to declare the Father, from whose bosom 
he came forth, whom no man had seen or could see. The 
title of apostles, by which he saw it meet to designate his 
twelve chosen disciples, is, as you are aware, but the render- 
ing into Greek of the same idea, which, borrowing the word 
from the language of the Romans, we express by the term 
missionary ; and the Saviour himself is by Paul described as 
the great Apostle of our profession, or in other words, the 
chiefest Missionary of the Church. Now the field cf his 
labor and his missionary character may assume different as- 
pects, according to the point of view from which our obser- 
vations are made. If we look to the original Godhead of the 
messenger, and to the glory which he had with the Father 
before the foundation of the world, his mission was a distant 
one. To bring the glad message to our earth from the far 
Heavens, he emptied himself of glory, became a voluntary 
exile from the society of the pure and the blessed, and taking 
on him the nature of sinful man,became the sharer of his mis- 
eries, and the perpetual witness of his iniquities. In this 
sense it was to a foreign shore that he came, and to an alien 
race that he ministered ; and thus considered, his labors more 
nearly resemble those of the foreign missionary. But if we 
confine our regard to the mere humanity of our Lord, his 
missionary toils assume another aspect. His personal minis- 
try was far more limited and national in its character, than 
was his message. Although in his relation to our race of 
every kindred and of all lands, he is the second Adam, and 
the nature which he took upon him was that common to our 
whole kind, he was yet born in the land of promise, under 
the law given to Moses, and within the range of the covenant 
made with Abraham. By these bounds his personal ministry 
was for the most part limited. 

It might have been otherwise. The same indwelling 
Deity, that enabled him at an early age to confound the doc- 
tors of his nation, beneath the shadow of their own proud 
temple, might have been displayed, had he chosen it, at a 



222 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY, 

still earlier year of his life ; and the holy child might have 
preached the gospel to that heathenish Egypt, in which his 
infancy sought refuge. The Being, before whose eye, in the 
wilderness of temptation, were brought all the kingdoms of 
this world, with all the glory of them, might, had he so willed 
it, have traversed all those kingdoms in his own personal 
ministry. Clothing himself, had he chosen it, with those 
same miraculous gifts which he reserved for his kingly ascen- 
sion, then to be showered down on his Pentecostal Church, 
he might have visited land after land, declaring to every tribe 
of mankind, in their own dialect, the truths he came to re- 
veal. He might have been the first to carry the gospel to 
imperial Rome, and hunting the hoary profligate and dissem- 
bler Tiberius to his guilty retreat at Capreae, he might have 
reasoned before the crowned ruler of the world, of righteous- 
ness, temperance, and judgment to come, until he too, like an 
inferior ruler in after times, had trembled on his throne. He 
might have anticipated the labors of his servant Paul, by 
bearing the news of the unknown God, and the resurrection, 
to the philosophers of Athens. To the Roman people he 
might have declared himself as that great Deliverer, of whom 
their Virgil had already sung ; and the sages of Greece might 
have been compelled to own in him that Heavenly Teacher 
for whom their Socrates had longed. And the nations of the 
East now intently looking for the advent of a king, whose 
dominion should be a universal one, might have learned 
from our Lord's own lips, the spiritual and eternal nature of 
that kingdom they justly but blindly expected. And thus 
having filled the whole world with the echo of his fame, as a 
preacher of repentance and of faith, he might have returned 
to Jerusalem, out of which her prophets might not perish, 
there to consummate the atoning sacrifice of which he had 
testified. 

We say, Jesus Christ might thus have carried abroad the 
word of salvation to many nations. Instead, however, of 
doing this, he confined himself in his personal instructions to 
the bounds of Palestine, one visit to the coast of Tyre and 
Sidon excepted, and even of this it is most probable that he 
taught in that region only the Jews there scattered. In his 
occasional retirement from the violence of his enemies, he 
neither wandered to Arabia and its roving hordes of the race 
of Ishmael, on the south ; nor did he travel into the country 
of that powerful people, whose territories skirted Judea on 



CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 223 

the east, the Edomites, who were the kindred of Israel, as 
being the posterity of Esau. When the appeals of distress 
were made to him by those of another race, he himself drew 
attention to this restriction as being laid upon his own minis- 
try, declaring that he was not sent, but to the lost sheep of 
the house of Israel — was not sent, or in other language, his 
commission as a missionary preacher, went no further. To 
their relief he confined well nigh all his miracles. With the 
devotedness of a true patriot, he labored for the good of his 
own, although his own received him not. And to the end he 
persevered in this course. In the last week of his mortal 
career, when to his divine prescience the awful scenes of the 
betrayal, the mockery, the scourging, and the crucifixion were 
already present, as a vivid reality — when, seated with his dis- 
ciples on the sides of Olivet, he looked, with them, upon the 
city with its battlements and turrets, its long drawn terraces, 
and its gorgeous temple, spread out on the opposite heights, 
•but saw what their eyes could not see, and heard what their 
ears could not hear — when, in the garden that lay at his 
feet, his prophetic eye already discerned the bloody agony 
soon to bedew it, and viewed in the palaces of Herod and 
Pilate rising before him, all the scenes of ignominy and tor- 
ture he was soon there to encounter — when along the streets, 
now sending up but the hum of cheerful industrj r , his pro- 
phetic ear even now heard resounding the yells of the multi- 
tude, as they rushed from the place of judgment to the hill of 
Golgotha — even with these sights and sounds around him, 
from the thought of his own overwhelming baptism of an- 
guish, he could turn aside to weep over favored but guilty 
Jerusalem, with as ardent an affection as had ever filled the 
heart of a Hebrew, when his eye caught the first glance of its 
turrets on his yearly pilgrimage, and he hailed it in inspired 
song, as the city of the great King, seated on the sides of the 
north, beautiful for situation, and the joy of the whole earth. 
And after he had wrought out the great work of redemption, 
and gave his apostles, before his ascension, charge to bear his 
gospel among all nations, however remote, and however bar- 
barous, he yet added the restriction, that their labor should 
begin at Jerusalem. 

We are ready to admit that all this was needed for the 
accomplishment of the prophecies that went before concern- 
ing him. But Christ had, it should be remembered, the 
ordering of those very prophecies, for his was the Spirit that 



224 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 

prompted them. To refer this restriction of the field of 
Christ's labors to prophecy, is then only to make his plan of 
Home Missions a few centuries the older, and leave it still 
the work of his mind. Into the purposes which may have 
guided the Saviour in thus acting, we would not here enter. 
Whatever his intent, in thus narrowing the field of his toils 
as a preacher, the fact is evident that to the land of Canaan, 
or the bounds of his native country, his ministerial labors 
were confined, and Jesus Christ, while upon earth, was a 
Home Missionary. Now a work which occupied the greatest 
of preachers, can never be unimportant, and a plan of benev- 
olent effort, which marked the first ages of the Church, and 
was commended by the example of its great Head, can never 
become obsolete. 

Nor is this, beloved brethren, the onV point of contact 
between the ministerial labors of Christ, and the work in 
which you are engaged. We have seen how far resemblance 
to him may be claimed by your society in the scene of your 
labors. Bear with me, while I proceed to consider the com- 
mission under which he acted, the message he bore, the 
manner in which he published it, and the mode in which his 
labors were sustained. 

2. Of the commission under which he labored, it may in- 
deed be said, that it was peculiar to himself, and may be 
claimed by none others, that he spoke by his own authority. 
It was the natural result of his Deity as the equal Son of the 
Eternal Father. The scribe and the pharisee quailed before 
the self-sustained dignity of his teachings. Thus your Mis- 
sionaries may not teach. They may promulgate only the 
things His word contains, and in no other name than his are 
they to speak, or is the Church to receive their testimony. 
But in this respect they may claim to act under the same 
commission with Christ, that they are embraced within its 
ample provision of gifts and blessings to the Church. As 
the Father hath sent me, said he to his disciples, so send I 
you. To them thus sent he promised his own perpetual 
presence and aid. Lo I am with you always, even unto the 
end of the world. Again in the mission of the Saviour, he 
inherited, as a qualification for its varied tasks, the Spirit with- 
out measure, and with him is its inexhaustible residue. Now 
of this Spirit, in its due and needed measure, he has vouch- 
safed to communicate to the Church and its teachers. To 
communicate it to his apostles, he employed forms on which 



CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 225 

the Church dared never venture, and which well betokened 
his own self-derived and incommunicable right, as God, to 
dispense it. The apostles were wont, by the imposition of 
hands, an act ever accompanied with prayer, to confer the 
gifts of the Spirit, acknowledging thus that to* God they 
looked up for the blessing. He, on the contrary, breathed 
on the twelve, as if to show its native and perpetual in-dwell- 
ing within him, and in a brief sentence, which, were he not 
God, would be condensed and inspissated blasphemy, said : 
" Receive ye the Holy Ghost." Although not thus given, 
you believe that the same Spirit yet remains to teach and 
bless the Church. Did not that Spirit, as you trust, first 
endow them, your Missionaries would not have been accepted. 
Did he not attend them, and work with them, they could not 
be prospered. May it not then without irreverence be claimed, 
that the men sustained by your alms in the mission field, go 
forth under the same commission with Christ ; since he him- 
self construed that commission as including the subordinate 
laborers of all times, whom he should raise up — since he 
has himself promised his personal aid and presence with 
these to the end of time — since the Spirit that first endowed, 
and that yet prospers them, is all his own — and is one with 
that Spirit by which he himself was anointed for his great 
work, under the commission by him received of the Father 1 
3. As to the message which he bore, its great burden was 
repentance and faith, as ushered into the kingdom of God. 
He taught this truth by his herald and forerunner John, and 
continually reiterated it in his own ministry. He veiled it in 
his parables — he mingled it with his miracles of mercy — 
he spoke it in the ears of his favored apostles-— he published 
it on the house-top to the indiscriminate multitude. On the 
mountain side, or sitting in the ship, in the way as he walked, 
or leaning in weariness on the brink of the well, in the home 
of his poorer disciples, or the banqueting chambers of 
some richer host, still this was his theme. And what other 
dare your missionaries substitute ? Varied as may be the 
garb into which it is thrown, man's corruption and condem- 
nation, the need of repentance and faith, that faith in Christ 
as a King, and a Redeemer as well — are not these the top- 
ics still applicable and never trite, of which the Church shall 
not have exhausted the glories, or fathomed the mysteries, 
ages after the world shall have been consumed, and all its 
tribes shall have been adjudged to heaven or to hell for ever? 

30 



226 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 

Your laborers then in the far West are yet carrying abroad 
the same gospel which Christ bore in weariness to the city 
of Samaria, and scattered along the shores of the lake Gen- 
nesareth, and published as he walked the streets of Jerusa- 
lem, or stood and cried in the thronged courts of the temple. 
4. But in the manner, too, in which he published his mes- 
sage, it was said that our Lord had shown himself the great 
exemplar of the Home Missionary. In this single feature, 
had he manifested no other claim to a divine mission, our 
Lord proved himself endowed with superhuman wisdom. 
We refer to the means he selected for propagating his reli- 
gion amongst mankind. There had lived in the Gentile 
world men of high intellectual endowments, who had dis- 
cerned the ignorance and corruption of their age, and aspired 
to become its reformers. But although some were deified 
for their fancied success, futile had been their endeavors ; 
and most cumbrous yet most imbecile the instrumentalities, 
upon which they had chosen to rely. Some had been legis- 
lators, bequeathing to their fellow-citizens new forms of gov- 
ernment ; others, warriors appealing to brute force, and im- 
posing by the strong hand of power their improvements upon 
the feebler race whom they had subdued ; others resorted to 
what they deemed allowable and pious frauds, forging proph 
ecies, inventing mysteries, and bribing oracles ; others phi 
losophized, and yet others employed the elegant arts to soften 
and to better the human character. But none of them knew 
aright the might of the Leviathan they affected to curb and 
tame. Man, though disguised by civilization, and adorned 
by science and art, was still the same selfish and godless 
savage at heart, that he had ever been. Mutually wronged 
and wronging, the race was yet, as Paul too truly described 
them, hateful and hating one another. Of the depth of cor- 
ruption into which alike the Jew who boasted of a law he 
would not keep, and the Gentile, whom he scorned, were 
sunk at the time of Christ's coming, Paul has told us in lan- 
guage of fearful significancy. How dreadfully the history of 
the world filled up the gloomy outlines that master-hand had 
drawn in the opening of his epistle to the Romans, I need 
not say to you. And yet all this went on, in spite of efforts 
the most earnest, the most varied, and the most costly, to 
check, or at least to conceal the evil. But it was only to 
varnish putridity, and to gild over decay, that these earthly 
reformers came. Of ever profiting the vast mass of the 



CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY, 227 

people, the most intelligent of these sages despaired. They had 
no hope except for the wise and the lettered portion of soci- 
ety. To these they spoke in veiled and guarded language. 
For these, their select hearers able to bear it, they had an 
internal or esoteric doctrine. To the multitude they held 
out doctrines often utterly the opposite of these their private 
teachings ; and the poor and the ignorant they looked upon 
as an inferior kind, like the "brute beasts made to be taken 
and destroyed;" to be entrapped by error, and given over to 
unpitied ruin. As the larger portion of mankind will ever 
be found in the classes of neglected and restricted education, 
to despair of the poor and of the many, was virtually to de- 
spair of the well-being of the race.* 

Another obstacle, which these reformers felt themselves 
incompetent to assail, was found in the false but received 
religions. To change the religion of a whole nation, when 
once established, was deemed an impossibility. Plato, among 
the wisest of Grecian schemers, makes it an axiom in his 
celebrated treatise of a republic, " that nothing ought to be 
changed by the legislator in the religion which he finds al- 
ready established ; and that a man must have lost his under- 
standing to think of such a project." \ Yet not to change 
the religion of one nation only, but of all nations, is Jesus 
Christ come. Look at the varied forms of error that met 
him, all obstinate by the force of ancient and inherited pre- 
judices, and by the violence of the passions they indulged 
and sanctified, and made venerable in the eyes of the people 
by the lapse of time. In his own nation he encountered 
truth tenaciously held, but held perversely and partially, and 
in all unrighteousness. In the lettered classes of the Roman 



* A similar feeling with regard to the multitude, the reader may remember, 
has marked many of the reformers of modern times, who have claimed to re- 
lease the world from the dominion of Christianity. The private correspond- 
ence of the patriarch of French infidelity — whom his disciples were accus- 
tomed to hail, in language borrowed from that Bible at which they scoffed, 
as their " Father of the Faithful" — contains the following passage. It is in 
a letter to his fellow-laborer D'Alembert, and when congratulating his friend 
on the progress of their principles : " Let us bless this happy revolution, that 
has within the last fifteen or twenty years taken place in the minds of all 
respectable people (tous les honnetes gens). It has outrun my hopes. As to 
the rabble, I meddle not with them ; tJie rabble they will always remain. I am 
at pains to cultivate my garden, but yet it will have its toads ; they should not 
however prevent my nightingales from singing" Lettres de M. de Voltaire 
et de M. d'Alembert, 211. 

t Warburton's Divine Legation, Book iii. § 6. 



228 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 

empire, he saw a band of learned and acute triflers, addicted 
to a heartless and endless scepticism, or of debauched error- 
ists, in whose mind atheism and profligacy, in drunken alli- 
ance, leaned each upon the other. The mass of the nation 
were the corrupt votaries of paganism, in its most corrupt 
forms ; sensual and sanguinary, they had become enervated 
by luxury, and yet were ravening for blood. Equally fierce 
and cruel, if not alike sensual, were the superstitions of the 
savage hordes whom they held in check, or retained in their 
pay on the borders of the empire. In the East were the 
worshippers of fire. Arabia, and Persia, and India, and 
Scythia, and Egypt, all had their national idols. The in- 
quiry had been made by Jeremiah six centuries before, " Pass 
over the isles of Chittim and see ; and send unto Kedar and 
consider diligently and see if there be such a thing. Hath 
a nation changed their gods, which yet are no gods ?" And 
the inquiry, made as if to challenge an instance of its occur- 
rence, had remained unanswered. Yet the reputed son of a 
carpenter, a man of Nazareth, the most despised city of the 
Jews, the most despised of nations, rises up to make the 
attempt. And what are his resources ? Is he patronized by 
kings ? Is he levying armies, and equipping fleets, or is he 
compiling new codes of law, or dispatching ambassadors and 
forming treaties ? None of all these things. But perhaps 
he has won to his party the sophists of Greece, and the schol- 
ars of Athens, the learned, and acute, and eloquent disciples 
of Epicurus, and Zeno, and Plato, are retained in his inter- 
ests, and are disseminating his peculiar sentiments? — Not 
so. The wisdom of this world he has counted foolishness, 
and his doctrine teaches that the most labored result of 
human intelligence has been confirmed ignorance, as to the 
first and most obvious of all truths — that the wise have failed 
to spell out the handwriting and superscription of a Creator, 
though found upon all his works — and the world by wisdom 
knew not God. But he has converted, perhaps, the Sanhe- 
drim, and the Rabbies of Israel ; the lights of the law and 
the oracles of the people are with him? No, he has de- 
nounced them with fearless severity, and they are plotting his 
death. But Herod is in his favor, and Pilate is his friend? 
No, Herod is seeking to see him, in vain, dreading in him 
the resurrection of the Baptist he had slain ; and Pilate is 
neither concerned nor able to give him protection from the 
fury of his own nation. But the Reformer moves on, 



CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 229 

nothing daunted. Unlike all others who despised the people, or 
despaired of them, he addresses himself to the poor and the 
ignorant. It is the mass of the nation he hopes first to reach. 
But what are his arts of persuasion with the people ? Does 
he hold out the lure of wealth, or earthly honors, or pleasure ? 
Is he slipping the leash of law and order from the passions 
of the multitude, and cheering them on to the prey that is 
before them in the possessions of the wealthy ? He honestly 
assures his auditory that they must expect to lose all in fol- 
lowing him, that his poorest followers must become yet 
poorer, and that his disciples are doomed men, bearing their 
own crosses on their way to death. He writes no books. 
He forms no plots. He meddles not with political strife ; 
nor interferes with religious sects, but to denounce them all, 
end to turn their combined enmity on his single and unshel- 
tered head. And the weapon by which he is to foil all his 
enemies, and to subdue the world to the obedience of the 
faith, is — hear it, O heavens, and be astonished, O earth! — 
the foolishness of preaching — the plain tale of man to his 
fellow-men concerning God and his Christ. By the preach- 
ing of the word, and especially to the poor, Christ is come 
to change the face of society. Jesus Christ was, indeed, the 
discoverer of these two great truths, that all reformations 
must begin with the lower classes, and that preaching is the 
grand instrument of changing the opinions of a nation. The 
latter had indeed been used in the older dispensation, but its 
applicability to such a scheme as that of the world's conver- 
sion, had never been suspected. Yet how well established 
are both now become. The man, who in endeavoring to 
heat a mass of water, should build his fire above the fluid, 
would in physics be but as absurdly employed, as the man 
who in morals looks to the highest points of a corrupt society 
as the first to be reformed. As in the heated liquid, the lower 
stratum when warmed passes upward, and gives place to 
another still cold, which is in its turn penetrated with heat, 
and then displaced by the descending of yet another ; so in 
the moral world, the only efficient reforms are the reforms 
that begin at the lower portion of society, and work upward. 
It was so in the first preaching of the gospel. It was so in 
the English Reformation. It was so in the religious influence 
that followed the labors of Wesley and Whitefield. And 
Jesus Christ first discovered and first applied this great but 
simple principle, that to the poor the gospel should be 



230 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 

preached. Again let us consider the character of the instru- 
mentality he selected. It was the cheapest of all implements. 
And where the many were to be reached by many laborers, 
and the poor by the poor, its cheapness was a matter of no 
little moment. A book would be worn out, ere it had taught 
a thousand readers, or travelled a hundred miles. The liv- 
ing teacher might go on from land to land, and instruct myr- 
iads after myriads. If the book were unskilfully composed, 
its errors must remain unchanged. If addressed to one class 
originally, one class only it continued to the end to interest. 
The living evangelist varied his message and form of address, 
as varying circumstances required, and appealed in different 
modes to the differing habits of the regions and classes through 
which he passed. The book might meet many who knew 
not how to read, but all might hear the living voice. The 
book could not solicit the careless to hear, or pursue the 
wanderer who fled from reproof. The living teacher sought 
his auditory in the retreats whither they betook themselves. 
The book was a cold and unimpassioned abstraction. The 
preacher was a living, breathing thing, appealing to all the 
sympathies of man's nature. His countenance, his gestures, 
his tones, all sought and won him the attention of men. 
And it was left for Jesus- Christ to discover that this was the 
great instrumentality for correcting the popular faith of a 
nation, as being the cheapest, and as having the widest range 
of influence, the utmost variety in its applicability, and the 
greatest power and life in its appeals. We speak consider- 
ately when we say, that the institution of preaching as the 
great means of national illumination and conversion, is not 
one of the least among the evidences of the Saviour's super- 
human wisdom, and consequently another argument for his 
divine mission. 

Now while the stationary pastor, in the more abundantly 
supplied districts of a Christian land, may claim to labor in 
this our Lord's appointed mode, the preaching of the word, 
may you not assume, that to the Home Missionary belongs 
eminently the honor of preaching to the poor, and of caring 
for the neglected and destitute, the class to whom Christ 
himself chiefly addressed his gospel, and in its being addressed 
to whom, he bade the anxious Baptist and his disciples re- 
cognize one of the many proofs of his Messiahship ? The 
laborer in the field of Home Missions is applying therefore 
the favorite instrumentality of his Lord in his Lord's favorite. 



CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 231 

mode. And upon this instrumentality, it is your instruction 
to them that they chiefly rely. And while they may scatter 
the tract, and gather the Sabbath school, and use every other 
means that may aid man in the knowledge of his God, their 
main business, and your great charge to them given, is that 
** as ye go, preach." 

5. We have seen that in the manner of publishing his 
message, our Lord was not unlike the laborers whom you 
employ. Let us lastly observe the comparison you may in- 
stitute with the ministry of our Lord, in the similar means 
adopted for the support of the laborer. Christ did not, then, 
like the established priesthood of Israel, find himself sustained 
by the tithes of the land. No State furnished from her rev- 
enues the endowments of his mission, or taxed her subjects 
to secure through his means their spiritual good. The free 
contributions of those whom he instructed, enlightened and 
saved, were the only revenues to w T hich he looked. And 
these, you will observe, were given not to sustain him in his 
labors for the donors, so much as to aid him in journeying 
omvard to benefit others. The frugal meal and the shelter- 
ing roof were the reward that poverty gave for words such 
as never man spake. Salvation came to the house he visited, 
and when he parted, his blessing was left with its inmates. 
But in addition, he seems to have received, from time to time, 
of the free-will offerings, which, from their abundance or their 
penury, his disciples contributed, to meet the wants of the 
morrow, when he should have reached a distant hamlet, and 
be discoursing to a new auditory. These contributions one 
of the apostles bore, and dispensed to meet the necessities of 
that wayfaring company. Pious women followed him min- 
istering of their substance. 

Now it is to such resources that your enterprise looks. 
You have not been subsidized from the national treasury. 
Nor have your missionaries been empowered, or been willing, 
to sit them down at the receipt of custom, collecting from the 
traffic of the land a stinted tithe, in acknowledgment of the 
temporal blessings with which the gospel has enriched every 
walk of society. To the free gratuities of Christians, them- 
selves benefited by the gospel, and anxious to spread before 
others the word that God has made the power of salvation 
to their own souls — to their spontaneous alms, gathered 
unequally and rather according to the willingness of the heart, 
than the fullness of the hands, you have been compelled to 



232 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 

look as your only treasures. And though the store has o en 
seemed well nigh spent, ever wasting, it has been ever re- 
newing itself, like the widow's cruse, still as it was emptied, 
still by the goodness of Providence mysteriously replenished. 
And the relief thus given has resembled that which sustained 
our Lord's own personal ministry, in the fact, that it was not 
the giver's own benefit that was immediately sought. The 
Christian supports at home his pastor to preach to himself 
and to his children, but he supports the Home Missionary to 
preach to his destitute neighbors. It was in this way that 
the disciples of our Saviour sustained their master, not ex- 
pecting it as the condition of their gratuities, that he should 
continue day after day to bless with his lengthened stay their 
own hamlets and households, but that he might journey on- 
ward from village to village, and city to city of their native 
land. 

The Redeemer, then, in his own personal efforts as an 
evangelist, gave himself to the very work in which your 
Society is toiling, the supply of the religious destitutions of 
your own land. And ere we pass, let it be remembered, that 
upon principles unlike the timorous and stealthy policy, 
which his church in the days of persecution adopted, of 
choosing rather as the scene of her labors, the retired valley, 
and the remote and safe wilderness, Christ, as we see in the 
words of our text,* and in the whole record of the gospels, 
sought to plant his word, though in the face of fiercer oppo- 
sition and surer and greater risk, in the towns and cities of 
the land. He bade his disciples, in times of persecution in 
one city, to flee indeed, but it was only to another city ; and 
their ministry he at the same time describes, as a going over 
the cities of Israel. He chose these as the scenes of labor, 
for his work was with men, and men were there to be found 
in the greatest number. He did so, because his hours were 
few, and there the greatest effects might be wrought in the 
shortest time. He did so, because his gospel was the remedy 
of human depravity and misery, and in the crowded dwellings 
of man, his depravity assumes its most aggravated forms, and 



* See also Luke iv. 43. How rigidly the early preachers adhered to our 
Lord's plan in the dissemination of the gospel, appears from the fact, that the 
inhabitants of the cities in the Roman empire had become nominally Chris- 
tian, while the rural population remained yet plunged in idolatry, and the 
word Pagan, or villager Qmganus) became synonymous with heathen. 



CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 233 

his sufferings are most intense and distressing. He did so, 
because these are the points of radiation, around which the 
character of the whole nation crystalizes and becomes fixed, 
and in ancient as in modern times, the impress of the metrop- 
olis is to some extent seen upon the most distant and rude 
of the rural population. Ever then may it be the prayer and 
the policy of this Society, acting upon the like principles, to 
plant its missionaries in the towns and cities of our land, till 
they be fully supplied with the preaching of the gospel. 

Yet let it not be supposed, that we would exalt the impor- 
tance of Home Missions at the expense of the foreign field. 
We believe the latter, if a division and a choice were admis- 
sible, (which they are not,) we should believe the latter, the 
more needful work of the church. It was indeed one of the 
characteristics of the superiority of the new over the older 
dispensations, that it looked beyond all the former boundaries 
of national prejudice and selfishness, and taught men that the 
field of benevolence is the world. Our Saviour himself, 
during his own more restricted ministry, alluded to these 
designs of mercy for the Gentile. In his discourses at Naz- 
areth he called his hearers to observe, that the Gentile widow 
of Zarephath had been honored by entertaining a prophet of 
God, when the many widows of Israel were passed by, and 
that the leprous nobleman of heathenish Syria had been 
miraculously healed, while the many lepers of Israel were 
left unrelieved. This was a theme the Jews could least of 
all things endure. They thrust the Saviour from their city, 
and would have killed him, just as in succeeding years, their 
countrymen at Jerusalem heard Paul patiently, until he 
mentioned a divine mission to the Gentiles, when they ex- 
claimed, Away with him, he is not fit to live. Christ from 
the beginning contemplated foreign missions as the field of 
his church ; but his own was a Home Mission. And while 
the church, from his teachings, and the example of his apos- 
tles, learns to regard Foreign Missions as her chief care, she 
cannot sever it from the work of Home Missions. They are 
indissolubly united, and each needs the other — the farther 
and the nearer sides of the same great net ; the fishers of 
men are needed alike, to bear the one into the bosom of the 
deep, and to guard the other along the edge of the shore. 
The true interests of each are necessarily advanced by the 
growth of the other. 

II. We have seen our Lord himself devoting the years of 
31 



234 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. # 

his personal ministry to the preaching of the gospel through- 
out his own country. With such a sanction of your endeav- 
ors, what motives are needed to impel you ? His example 
to guide, His presence to uphold, and His Spirit to prosper 
you — if the Lord be thus for you in the splendor of his ex- 
ample, for you in his promises, and for you in his wonder- 
working Spirit, who can be against you? Whether we look 
to the advantages which our nation presents for such labor, 
or to its peculiar necessities, to our duty as Christians, or 
our interests as men loving their country, to the general ob- 
ligations of the church, or our own personal and special 
privileges and responsibilities, — on every hand are teeming 
incitements to energy and liberality, to perseverance and 
courageous devotedness. 

1. Do we speak of the advantages, which our wide-spread 
land presents for labor of this kind ? We cannot forget, that 
here are none of the impediments of an adverse government, 
and an alien nation suspicious of your missionaries as foreign 
emissaries — impediments with which the laborer abroad 
must ever contend. From the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of 
Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains, and 
yet onward to the coasts of the Pacific, a broad and goodly 
land is open or opening before you, — not the land of stran- 
gers, but your own native soil, blest with free institutions, 
and a government springing from and accountable to the 
people. Its free institutions invite the free and glad labors 
of the Missionary. The national appetite for knowledge, 
and the many endowments and appliances for the diffusion 
of knowledge, promise you aid, in bringing before the na- 
tional intellect the only knowledge that is of unmingled truth 
and immutable value. The land is inhabited by a people, 
not divided and isolated, as are the possessors of equal spaces 
of territory in the old world, by the varieties of dialect and 
languages, which make man seem as a barbarian to his neigh- 
bor, separated from him but by a river, or a range of moun- 
tains. The language of your forefathers, the language in 
which your household bibles are written, is that which its 
cities, and its hamlet, and its farm-houses alike acknowledge — 
which its colonists are carrying into the depths of the forest, 
and the seeds of which its adventurous mariners are scatter- 
ing along every shore smitten by their keels. To make yet 
more plain your duties, and to render the wise and beneficent 
purposes of his Providence yet more easy of translation to 



CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 235 

the reason and the conscience of this people, God has made their 
country the point of attraction to the oppressed or the needy 
of other lands, and the eyes of many and distant nations are 
fixed upon you. Our Heavenly Father has made us a na- 
tional epistle to other lands. See that you read a full and 
impressive comment to all lands, of the power of Christian 
principle, and of the expansive and self-sustaining energies of 
the gospel, when left unfettered by national endowments, and 
secular alliances. The evangelical character of our land is to 
tell upon the plans and destinies of other nations. See to it, 
that the men, who quote your democracy and your enter- 
prise, your energy and your increase, be compelled by glar- 
ing evidence, which they may not dispute, and cannot conceal, 
to add, that for your freedom and all its better fruits, you are 
indebted to the religion of the Saviour borne throughout the 
length and breadth of your land. And last among the advan- 
tages with which God has endowed you, and bound you, as 
it were, to this work, let me name the amount of uneducated 
or perverted mind, which He is daily quarrying from the 
mines of European superstition, and from the place where 
Satan's seat is, and casting down upon our shores to be in- 
serted into the rising walls of your republic. At home it 
was comparatively beyond your reach. The jealousy of 
priestly and of kingly rule guarded it from your approach. 
God has brought it disencumbered to your shores. Will you 
meet it with the gospel? — will you follow it to its western 
homes with the Missionary ? Your prayers have ascended 
to God in behalf of those perishing in the darkness of false 
religion in other lands. Your prayers have been answered, 
as God is wont to answer even his own people, in the mode 
and the hour they were perhaps least prepared to expect the 
boon ; and while your souls thought only of the subjects of 
your petitions, as dwellers on a foreign shore, He has in his 
wondrous working made them already the denizens of your 
own land, and the crowds, to whom you had hoped to send 
the Foreign Missionary, have already besieged your doors 
to ask the easier, and the cheaper, care of your Home Mis- 
sions. Their souls are evidently as valuable here, as they 
would have been if sought out by your messengers on their 
native soil, and there won to the faith of Christ. You know 
not, but that, although transplanted to this soil, they may 
still retain a hold so strong on the affections, and an influence 
so controlling on the character and destinies of the kindred 



236 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 

and countrymen they have left behind, that converted here 
by the labors of your Home Missions, they may become the 
allies, or the channels, or themselves the chosen instruments 
of your Foreign Missions to the lands whence they came. 
It was thus in the declining ages of the Roman empire, that 
the hordes of Paganism, disgorged from their own native 
seats upon the imperial territories, became themselves chris- 
tianized by the nation they had invaded, and evangelized the 
paternal tribes they had quitted. Let us, then, regard the 
emigrants around us, not as invaders, but as the exiles of a 
country, of which they or their children may yet become the 
evangelists. Let us count wisely and gratefully the number 
of the deathless spirits, who have thus been ushered, under 
the most favorable circumstances, into our borders. Many 
of them have been the nurslings of a corrupt or careless 
hierarchy ; and torn from the breasts of European error, they 
are now committed by the hand of Providence to the foster- 
ing care of your Sabbath Schools, and Bible classes, and the 
pioneer churches planted and watered by the care of your 
Missionaries. 

2. As to the advantages, so to the necessities of our case 
we need ever to look. We may not forget, or hold negligently 
the civil privileges, the envied but the fragile inheritance 
which our fathers have bequeathed us. The strangers day 
by day wafted to your shores become your fellow sovereigns. 
They choose with you the law-makers. They interpret and 
modify, sustain or subvert your Constitution. If not con- 
verted, under God, by you to the faith, they will with the 
characteristic energy of evil, sacrifice your dearest earthly 
interests to their passions, their superstitions and their crimes. 
Your written constitutions, your declarations of right and of 
national independence, your books of statute law and of pre- 
cedent, contain in themselves no inherent principle of vitality. 
They operate and have life, but in proportion as that life is 
infused into them by the feelings and conscience of the nation. 
The reign of violence has passed ; men talk now of the reign 
of written constitutions. But parchment and paper cannot 
give freedom, or uphold it when given. Ours is a govern- 
ment of public opinion, and each day the channels, by which 
that public opinion may act upon the laws, tribunals and 
treaties of the nation, seem shortening and widening, turning 
each day a fuller and more direct and more rapid stream upon 
the ostensible rulers, and the written laws of the nation. la 



CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 237 

the formation of this sovereign principle of opinion, your new- 
found fellow-citizens wish to share, and cannot but share, 
even did they not wish it. If not educated and sanctified, 
they will only lower and dilute the tone of public morals, 
already, alas, too evidently declining ; and a vitiated public 
opinion will send its reeking corruption into your senate- 
chambers, your halls of justice, your schools, your ware- 
houses, and your homes, until licentiousness, and profaneness, 
and violence, like the curse of Egypt, be found a croaking 
and slimy plague infesting the whole land. Nor may we 
hide from ourselves the fact, that unfriendly influences of the 
most seductive character are busy — that the work of natural 
corruption is not left to its own natural course, but supersti- 
tions, which have in other lands and ages held the widest 
sway, are assiduously engaged in the work of education and 
proselytism amongst us ; 

" And bold with joy, 
Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, 
(Portentous sight,) the owlet Atheism, 
Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, 
Drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, 
And hooting at the glorious sun in heaven, 
Cries out, ' r Where is it?"* 

And yet amid these dangers, that self-gratulation " which 
goeth before a fall " as surely in a nation as in the individual, 
is so evident, as to be imputed to us as a national foible. 
Privileges, singular and great, we indeed have ; but the only 
light in which it is safe to view them, is that of the corre- 
sponding obligations they impose. Signal mercies, if misused, 
must provoke judgments as signal ; and American Christians, 
if unfaithful to their high trust, will be made examples of 
God's sore indignation. And among the difficulties of our 
situation, felt not indeed except by the church, let us remem- 
ber the demands of the Foreign Mission field, each day in- 
creasing. To meet these, the Home Mission enterprise must 
be sustained by the churches at home, until made by its in- 
fluence united, intelligent and devoted, they become the 
camp and armory, from which shall be sent forth yet other 
and more numerous levies of conscripts for the foreign service 
of the Church of Christ. 

3. The motives which urge you to the work, in view of 
these considerations, will naturally suggest themselves to all, 

* Coleridge. 



238 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 

and are alike varied and powerful. Self-interest and the love 
of kindred furnish them. The more aged among us cannot 
but desire to transmit to the coming generations, unimpaired, 
the immunities and blessings they received themselves from 
those who went before. To the young men of our churches, 
we might speak of the peculiar interest which, as the future 
inheritors of the land, they have, to escape the evils of igno- 
rance and irreligion, and to avert, if it may. be, the storm 
that will descend on the quiet graves of their fathers, but which 
they still surviving must buffet for themselves, or be swept 
before its violence. We might appeal to your love of man 
as such, or to your love of country, and ask on these grounds 
your alms and your prayers in this good work. But if the 
Roman patriot could say of the paramount force and en- 
grossing character of that high motive — love to our coun- 
try : — " Dear are the charities of home ; dear are parents, 
and dear are our children ; but our one country, yet dearer, 
combines all the charities of us all ;" — I would speak to you, 
brethren, of a higher love, blending with and absorbing as 
well this as all minor charities. As lovers of your country I 
might urge, and as lovers of your kind I might require you ; 
but by a love which sanctifies, and itself surpasses all others, 
I beseech you ; as the lovers of Christ, or rather let me say 
as the beloved of Christ, whom he has loved to the death, 
has ransomed and is sanctifying ; give to this work your 
prompt aid, your prayers and your efforts. And while some 
give of their substance, and some add their counsel, and all 
their prayers, are there not yet others here, who are girding 
themselves to a costlier offering, and' who are prepared to 
become themselves a whole burnt-offering upon the altars of 
the church, and as a living sacrifice to spend and be spent, 
in the personal labor of bearing the gospel to the destitute ? 
In the consuming flames of divine charity, our Lord be- 
came himself a willing victim, and the zeal of his Father's 
house devoured him. To reach and rescue you, he shrunk 
from no sacrifice. Requite him by love intense and absorb- 
ing, like that love which it reflects. And to those here, who 
are themselves honored by their personal engagements as the 
missionary preachers of the church, let me say: Brethren, 
remember in your most painful sacrifices, in the most distress- 
ing repulses that your efforts may encounter, you can never 
know the peculiar agony of soul which our Lord Jesus Christ, 
as a Home Missionary, endured. Among the most affecting 



CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 239 

pages in the history of David Brainerd, is the journal of that 
Sabbath which he spent amid the idolatrous revellings of the 
heathen, who had refused to listen to his teachings. Desti- 
tute of all Christian society, he had retired to the forest, and 
there in desolate loneliness sat him down with his Bible in 
his hand, while at a little distance, they yelled and danced 
in honor of their demons. Even that devoted man sunk in 
the trial, and describes the absence of all sympathy and 
Christian society, as making this the most burdensome Sab- 
bath he had ever known. Now this loneliness, which for 
the time crushed even the spirit of a Brainerd, was felt by 
our Lord, as none else could feel it. There was no heart 
even among his disciples, with whom he could have true and 
entire communion. Omniscient, he read perpetually the evil 
in the breasts of all that surrounded him. All was naked 
and opened to him. The ambition, the jealousy, the distrust, 
and the avarice of his own apostles, the malignant hatred to 
God and all goodness that filled the souls of the impenitent 
around him, were necessarily and ever present to his view. 
And he himself was all purity, entirely and intensely abhor- 
ring evil in its slightest stains. This healthful and sensitive 
purity was condemned to be continually jostled by our de- 
pravity, and how harshly, in the rude collision, must it have 
been rasped by the hard, dry scurf of our moral leprosy. 
His was indeed a peculiar solitariness, as he moved a sinless 
one among sinners. The anguish of this loneliness, this 
daily death, endured by our Master, we may never know. 
But of these the sacrifices of his love we do well often to 
think, that our own may be rekindled. 

There are those here, who giving of their substance and 
their cares to the good w r ork, withhold their own hearts. 
The yoke of Christ, which is easy, their necks do not yet 
wear ; and his burden, which is light, they refuse to assume. 
Dwelling in cities each one of whose moving multitudes lives, 
moves, and has his being in God — or the tillers of fields 
which He only has blessed with fruitful seasons, filling your 
hearts with food and gladness — in the enjoyment of a plenty, 
a freedom and a peace which Christ's providence gave — in 
the daily hearing of his commands, and with his sacrifice for 
sin hourly before your view, you yield him no love, and act 
as if you owed him no allegiance. The Giver is shut out 
from the heart by barriers which his own gifts have been 
employed to form. O, remember that a land which sends 



240 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 

forth the gospel to other lands, a community that sustain the 
missionary to labor amid their own and foreign destitution, 
as they are the most favored, so they may be also the most 
guilty of all lands and of all communities. Remember the 
curse of Jerusalem, and the plagues, of the nation whose hills 
had been traversed by a Saviour's feet, and the field of whose 
home missions a Saviour's own tears and blood had watered. 
Christ's word and Spirit have come nigh you — your own 
kindred and friends are found in his church. And God grant 
that the Redeemer who has thus taught in your streets, and 
wrought wonders even in your own homes and households, 
stand not up in the last day, an incensed and inflexible Judge, 
to condemn you for that gospel which you have sent U* others 
but rejected for yourselves. 



THE PUBLICATIONS OF THE AMERICAN TRACT 
SOCIETY. 

The Christian Library, 45 vols., 400 pages each. — The Evangelical 
Family Library, 15 volumes. — The Youth's Christian Library, 40 
volumes. 

The American Tract Society has been for years a familiar 
and cherished name with our churches. But many, even of 
intelligent Christians, have probably scarce made themselves 
conversant with its varied publications, or considered duly 
the influence it was likely to wield over the religious litera- 
ture of our own and other lands. They have thought, per- 
haps, of the Institution as furnishing a few excellent Tracts, 
in the form of loose pamphlets, and suppose these, with some 
children's books, to constitute the entire sum of its issues ; 
while in truth, the Society, noiselessly following the beckon- 
ing of Divine Providence, has been led to undertake the 
publication of volumes, and to furnish Libraries for Christian 
churches, schools, and households. These heedless observ- 
ers have thought of it mostly in connection with a few 
favorite Tracts written in our own vernacular language, 
while, in fact, the Society has come to be engaged in the 
circulation of books and Tracts in more tongues than the 
richest Polyglott comprises, and is extending its operations 
through lands more numerous and remote than any one pro- 
bably of the most widely-travelled of its readers has ever 
traversed. The moral and intellectual character of the relig- 
ious literature thus widely diffused deserves some thoughts.* 

The various publications of the Society in our own land, 

* It was made recently the subject of examination. At a special meeting 
of the Society and its friends, convened in the city of New York a few months 
since, several subjects were presented for consideration, as bearing on the 
character, plans, and duties of the Society. Amongst these was " The evan- 
gelical character of the Publications of the Society, and their adaptation to 
the wants of the present generation of mankind, at home and abroad." Upon 
the subject so assigned to the writer, the following remarks were prepared. 

32 



242 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 

if we include its issues of every form and size, from the 
handbill and the broad-sheet, up to the bound volume, already 
number one thousand. In foreign lands it aids in issuing 
nearly twice that number, written in some one hundred of 
the different languages and dialects of the earth. Amongst 
ourselves, in the seventeen years of its existence, it has al- 
ready, by sale or gift, scattered broadcast over the whole face 
of the land, in our churches and Sabbath-schools, through 
our towns and villages, among the neglected, in the lanes 
of our large cities, where misery retires to die, and vice to 
shelter itself from the eye of day ; and amidst the destitute, 
sparsely sprinkled over our wide frontiers, where the min- 
istry has scarce followed, and the church can scarce gather 
the scattered inhabitants, some two millions of books and 
some sixty millions of Tracts. This is no ordinary influence. 
It must find its way into nearly every vein and artery of the 
body politic. Whether it be of a pure and healthful charac- 
ter, is an inquiry of grave moment to the churches who sus- 
tain this enterprise, and to the country, which receives this 
literature. If baneful, it is a grievous wrong to the commu- 
nity ; if merely inert and useless, it is a fraud committed upon 
the benevolence of the churches. 

I. Whether these publications deserve the confidence of 
Christians, may be ascertained by the answer which is given 
to one question : Do they preach Jesus Christ and him 
crucified? He must be the theme of every successful 
ministry, whether preaching from the pulpit or through the 
press. The blessing of God's Spirit is promised only to the 
exaltation of the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. 
44 1, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." When 
Paul describes the peculiarities of his own successful minis- 
try — a ministry that shook the nations — a ministry that car- 
ried the blazing torch of its testimony from Illyricum to 
Spain, he compresses these into a very brief space. He was 
determined to know nothing but Christ Jesus and him cru- 
cified. In Christ he found the motive which stimulated all 
his fervid and untiring activity, and the model upon which 
was moulded every excellence of his character. " To me to 
live is Christ." Only so far as the issues of this Society 
cherish this same principle does it ask, and only so far can it 
deserve from the churches of our Lord Jesus Christ that 
cordial support and that large extension of its labors which 
it solicits at the hands of the religious community. 



THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 343 

And not only is it necessary to the success of such ministry 
of the press, that it should make the crucified Saviour the 
great theme of its teachings ; it should also present this theme, 
as far as possible, in a scriptural manner. By this we mean, 
not a mere iteration of the words of sacred writ, but that the 
mind of the writer should be so imbued with the spirit of 
the Scripture, and so possessed by its doctrines, and so 
haunted by its imagery and illustrations, as to present, natu- 
rally and earnestly, the great truths of the scheme of salva- 
tion, in that proportion and with those accompaniments which 
are found in the inspired volume. His thoughts must all be 
habited, as far as it may be, in the garb, and breathe the 
spirit of that only book to which we can ascribe unmingled 
truth. 

That the works of the American Tract Society are thus 
evangelical in their character, would seem scarce needing 
proof, since none, as far as we know, have yet questioned it. 
Amid the fierce and imbittered controversies, from which the 
church has never been exempt — and certainly not in our own 
times — we know not that any, among the several bodies of 
Christians generally recognized as evangelical, have arisen to 
impugn in this respect the character of the Society's issues. 
This has not been because these books have been secretly 
circulated. They have been found every where, dropped in 
the highway and lodged in the pastor's study, distributed in 
the nursery, the rail-car, the steamboat, and the stage-coach, 
as well as exposed on the shelves of the bookstore, and they 
have challenged the investigation of all into whose hands 
they have come. Denominations of Christians, divided from 
each other by varying views as to the discipline and polity of 
the church of Christ, and even holding opposite sentiments 
as to some of the more important doctrines of the Gospel, 
have yet agreed in recognizing in these publications the 
great paramount truths of that Gospel, and have co-operated 
long, liberally, and harmoniously, in their distribution and 
use. 

The names of the authors whose volumes are found in 
friendly juxtaposition, standing side by side on the shelves 
of the libraries the Society has provided for the Christian 
household and school, seem to furnish another strong pledge 
to the same effect. Doddridge, Baxter, Edwards, Owen, 
Flavel and Bunyan, are names that seem to belong less to 
any one division of the Christian host than to the whole 



244 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 

family of Christ. They are the current coin of the church, 
which have passed so freely from hand to hand, that the 
minuter superscription of the sects to which they may have 
belonged, the denominational imprint seems to have been 
worn away in the wide, unquestioned circulation they have 
received. And they have been acknowledged by evangeli- 
cal believers, wherever the English language and literature 
have gone, as faithful and most powerful preachers of the 
Gospel of Christ. They , have received higher attestation 
even than that of having their "praise" thus "in all the 
churches." The Head of the church has not withholden his 
benediction and imprint. The influence of his Spirit has 
long and largely rested on the written labors of these his 
servants ; and, while the authors themselves have been in 
the grave, their works are yet following them in lengthening 
and widening trains of usefulness. Multitudes have been 
converted, and thousands of others have traced to these books 
their own growth in Christian holiness. Some of these 
writers were, while upon the earth,' not inactive or unsuc- 
cessful as preachers with the living voice ; yet it may be 
questioned whether all the seals of their living ministry 
would equal the tithe of the seals which God has continued 
to set to their posthumous ministry in the volumes they have 
bequeathed to the world and the church. 

II. But how far are they adapted to the wants of the 
present generation of mankind? We know that in the 
varying tastes and habits of society, and its ever-shifting cur- 
rents of feeling, new channels of thought are scooped out, 
and new forms of expression become popular ; and the writer 
whose compositions present not these forms and move not 
in these channels, may find himself deserted as obsolete. 
His works are consigned to the unmolested and dusty shelves 
of the antiquarian, while other and fresher rivals grasp the 
sceptre of popularity and usefulness that has passed from his 
hands. New conditions of society and new institutions also, 
may require another style of address and another train of in- 
struction than those which, once indeed, were most salutary and 
seasonable, but are so no longer. If other classes of litera- 
ture become antiquated, and the old give place to the new, 
may it not be so with religious literature ; may it not be so 
with much of the literature from which the American Tract 
Society is seeking to supply the Christians of the present 
age? 



THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 245 

1. What, then, are the wants of the present age? Re- 
ligion, it should be remembered, if true, must be in its great 
principles unchangeable, and the same in all eras of the 
world's history. 

"Can length of years on God himself exact, 
And make that fiction which was once a fact." 

A revelation, from its source and the nature of its contents, 
possesses, therefore, a fixedness and constancy that can be* 
long to no science of merely human origin. The Bible 
stands apart from all the literature of man's devising, as a 
book never to be superseded — susceptible of no amendment, 
and never to be made obsolete whilst the world stands. The 
book of the world's Creator and the world's Governor, the 
record of the world's history and the world's duty, the world's 
sin and the world's salvation, it will endure while that world 
lasts, and continue to claim its present authority long as that 
government over the present world may continue. Religious 
works, therefore, the more profoundly they are imbued with 
the spirit of the Bible, will the more nearly partake of its in- 
destructibility. Hence the Confessions of Augustine, written 
so many centuries ago, are not yet an obsolete book, nor can 
be while the human heart and the Christian religion continue 
the same that they now are. In their religious literature, 
the church and the world in the nineteenth century must, 
therefore, in most respects, have the same wants as the 
church and the world in earlier ages. 

It will be allowed, however, that there are certain pecu- 
liarities in the history and character of an age that may make 
one form of address and one style of discussion much more 
useful and reasonable in its religious literature than another. 
Has our country at this period any such peculiar wants ? 
We might refer to many circumstances in its government 
and its people, their pursuits and their character, which dis- 
. tinguish, and, as it were, individualize our land and our age. 
But to sum them all in one word, we suppose the main dis- 
tinction and boast of our people is, that they are a practical 
race. Others theorize ; they act. Visionary reforms and 
schemes of society, that might in other regions be nursed for 
centuries in the brains of philosophers, and be deemed prac- 
ticable only because they have never been reduced to prac- 
tice, if they find proselytes amongst us, are soon brought to 
the test of actual experiment ; their admirers here act upon 



246 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 

the theories, which, elsewhere, are but reasoned upon, and 
the system exploding in the trial, refutes itself. Our coun- 
trymen, the colonists of a wide and fertile territory, the 
mariners whose keels vex every shore, and whose sails 
whiten the remotest seas, inherit the solid sense, the sober 
judgment, the energy, daring, and perseverance of the Anglo- 
Saxon race ; and their political institutions and the broad 
territory yet to be subdued and peopled, here give full scope 
to these traits of character. We are as yet, though a nation 
of readers, not a nation of students ; but much more a nation 
of seamen, farmers and traders. Our very studies are prac- 
tical ; and the cast of character which distinguished the Ro- 
man from the Greek mind, and which made the former the 
masters of the world — the practical character of the mind 
and its pursuits — belongs, in all climes and on every shore, 
to the Saxon race. If we, as a nation, have in this era of 
our history specific wants, we want, then, a practical litera- 
ture in religion, as in other branches of knowledge — a relig- 
ious literature, adapted with practical wisdom to the peculiar 
duties and snares, the prevalent errors, and the popular insti- 
tutions of our time. Has this Society furnished such ? 

That portion of its publications which are of American 
origin, and which its exertions have been the means of call- 
ing out, or of diffusing more widely where they already existed, 
all its books that are of recent and domestic origin, may be 
supposed naturally to possess some tolerable degree of adap- 
tation to our own national wants, the prevailing sins and 
follies of the times, and the peculiar responsibilities and priv- 
ileges of Christian churches in the United States, in the 
nineteenth century. The writers are of us, and wrote for 
us ; and we may suppose that these productions at least are 
not wanting in such adaptation. Their currency and their 
usefulness, the souls which, by the blessing of God, they 
have converted, and their influence on the faith, zeal, and 
purity of the churches, afford evidence of the same kind. 
Of the 430 pamphlet Tracts in the English language, issued 
by the Society, more than one half are of American origin. 
It was not so in the earlier years of the Society's history. 
Of the first one hundred Tracts on the lists of this Society, 
more than two-thirds were republications from works of British 
Christians, of the richest character, indeed, but they were 
Ihe siftings of a rich religious literature more than two cen- 
turies old. Of the last one hundred of these 430 Tracts, on 



THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 247 

the other hand, more than three-fourths were by American 
Christians. We have not pursued the investigation into the 
bound volumes of the Society ; but we suppose that there a 
similar result would be reached, although the proportion of 
American authorship is not yet as large, perhaps, as in the 
pamphlet Tracts. Here also it is increasing, however, and 
one-third of the volumes may be regarded as of domestic 
origin. It would be found, we suppose, that the Societ)^ 
in the brief period of seventeen years, has done much to 
create a national religious literature. 

To effect any literary changes, seventeen years, it should 
be remembered, is a very brief period. As far, then, as 
adaptedness to the special wants of this country can be de- 
cided by the domestic or foreign authorship ofits publications, 
it would appear that the Society has, with great rapidity, 
exerted a most perceptible and powerful influence on the 
writers and readers of our churches. It has elicited and dif- 
fused a literature that is emphatically for us, inasmuch as it 
is from ourselves. The intelligent Christian can never wish 
to see his denomination or his country confining its sympa- 
thies and its studies to the literature of the sect itself, or of 
that one country, thus shut up in the narrow circle of its own 
writers. Christianity is free, genial, and philanthropic — it 
loves the race. Christianity is the only true citizenship of 
the world, and it hails the writings and the history of all lands 
and all kindreds, when imbued with the spirit of the com- 
mon Saviour. But yet there may be certain evident advan- 
tages in having, for some purposes and within certain limits, 
a denominational and also a national literature in our churches. 
For this object of a national literature the American Tract 
Society may claim to have done much, and to have done it 
well. They have furnished a body of Tracts, popular in 
style, pungent and faithful, pithy, brief, and striking, that 
are singularly adapted to the moral wants of our community, 
and many of which, from their high excellence, would bear 
transplantation into the literature of almost any other Chris- 
tian country. 

2. As to the adaptedness for usefulness amongst our 
churches and people of those volumes and Tracts which the 
Society has derived from the rich Christian literature of 
Great Britain, it may be deserving of remark, that the more 
distinguished of these works are derived mainly from three 
memorable eras in the religious history of that country. 



248 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 

The first of these was the age of the Puritans and Non- 
conformists. Into the merits of their controversy with the 
Established Church of England it is no part of our design 
here to enter. They were, by the admission of the candid 
in every party, men of powerful intellect and ardent piety, 
whose principles had been tried and strengthened in the fierce 
collisions of their age, and whose character received, in con- 
sequence, an energy it might else have wanted. The meas- 
ures of government, that threw the Non-conformists out of 
their pulpits, were fitted to produce an admirable class of 
writings, such as the church has not often enjoyed. Many 
of these devout men, mighty in the Scriptures and incessant 
in prayer, had they been left to the quiet discharge of their 
pastoral duties, would have kept the noiseless tenor of their 
way, and the world would probably have heard little or 
naught of their authorship. Preaching would have absorbed 
their minds, and consumed all their strength. The mere 
preacher has little leisure, and often little fitness to be a suc- 
cessful writer. Thus the published remains of Whitefield 
are of little value, compared with the writings of many men 
far his inferiors in the pulpit and in its immediate results of 
usefulness. Had, then, the edicts and policy of the Stuarts 
left the Non-conformist fathers to their own chosen course, 
they would, many of them, have died and bequeathed no 
literary remains ; or those remains would have been com- 
paratively meagre and jejune, from the want of leisure in a 
life of active and unremitted pastoral toil. But, on the other 
hand, had the rich and varied writings of that class of men, 
who, from the prison or beside its very gate, sent out their 
treatises to their peeled and scattered churches, been com- 
posed by mere students, men of the lamp and the closet, they 
would have been deficient in their popular style, their ear- 
nestness, and their apt familiar illustrations. None but pas- 
tors, acquainted with the people and familiar with the popular 
modes of communicating religious truth, could thus have 
informed the deepest truths of theology and morals with a 
racy vivacity, and surrounded them with such simple and 
every-day imagery. 

Thus, only men who had been bred pastors could have 
written some of these works. And, on the other hand, had 
they continued pastors, they could not have written them 
for want of leisure, inclination, and even perhaps mental 
power. But when the prison and the pillory shut them in, 



THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 249 

and the pulpit had shut them out, these resolute and holy 
men resorted to the only channel left them for communicating 
with the hearts and consciences of men. It was the press. 
Had Baxter been a mere student and not a pastor, he would 
probably have made all his writings thorny, abstruse, and 
sterile, as the works of those schoolmen whose writings he 
seems so fondly to have loved and studied so closely. And, 
in that case, where had been the usefulness of the Saints' 
Rest and the Call to the Unconverted ? Had he continued 
always a pastor, he would have preached much more to the 
men of the 17th century ; but it is very questionable whether 
he would have preached as well or as much to the men of the 
19th century as he now does. Here, then, is a class of 
writers in whose history God seems to have made special 
provision that they should be trained to become effective as 
the practical writers of the church, bringing to the experience 
of the pastor all the leisure of the scholar, and grafting upon 
the meditations of the study all the unction, the simplicity, 
and the popular tact of the pulpit. 

In addition to these peculiar preparations for general use- 
fulness, the writings of the Puritans and Non-conformists 
come to us, as Americans, commended by considerations of 
singular force. The fathers of New England were of that 
class of men. The Adam and Eve of those regions were 
fashioned of Puritan clay ; and many of our peculiar institu- 
tions and our distinctive traits of national character may be 
traced, through that New England ancestry, to the character 
of the Puritans of England. We have a hereditary right in 
their works and memory. Their writings are moulded by 
peculiar influences, that have yet left their traces upon our 
mental idiosyncrasy as a people. Connected as then the 
Puritans of the mother country were with our progenitors 
by every tie of piety and blood, their voice comes upon the 
ears of American Christians like a testimony from the graves 
of those revered forefathers, who planted upon our rugged 
northern shores the germs of our freedom, our knowledge 
and our arts, while seeking only in the desert a refuge from 
persecution, and freedom to worship God ; but who left, 
where they sought merely a shelter, the foundations of a new 
empire, stretching its territories already from the Atlantic to 
the Pacific, and shedding the influence of its commerce and 
its freedom over either continent. 

The second of these eras, which have contributed to the 
33 



250 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 

Christian literature of this Society, is that of the great revi- 
val of religion, under the labors of Whitefield and the 
Wesleys in England, and the elder Edwards and the Ten- 
nants in our own country. It was a great religious move- 
ment, awakening from lethargy and recalling from perilous 
errors a portion of the English establishment, infusing a new 
life of piety into the English dissenters, as in our country it 
supplied the destitute and awakened the formal from Georgia 
to New Hampshire. It was an era, both here and in the 
parent country, of bitter controversy. The truths, recalled 
from their long concealment and urged with new zeal, were 
to be defended from the press, as well as from the pulpit or 
the open field, where so many of those preachers delivered 
their testimony. To this day it is that we owe the works of 
Doddridge and Edwards, that work of Venn which the Society 
has very recently republished, and the memoir of Edwards' 
disciple and friend, the glowing, suffering David Brainerd. 
In the necessities of that time we see, though to a less ex- 
tent, a combination of the same causes which made the Non- 
conformists' writings what they were. The preacher was 
grafted on the student. Had not Edwards had the experience 
of those glorious revivals God permitted him to witness and 
to record, he could, perhaps, still have written the work "On 
the Religious Affections ;" but it would have been a very 
different book. Without the resources of his rich pastoral 
experience it might have been as profound as the immortal 
Analogy of Butler, and as little fitted as that work to be gen- 
erally popular with the great mass of readers. 

The third of these memorable eras may be designated as 
the era of modern Christian enterprise. We know no fitter 
epithet to describe its varied activity, and its aggressive action 
on the ignorance of nominal Christendom and the wide 
wastes of heathenism. It began shortly after the breaking 
out of the French Revolution. It was an age when God 
seemed for a time to allow a new " hour and power of dark- 
ness" akin to that which brooded over the world when its 
Redeemer was about to suffer. Then boiled up from the 
lower deeps of the human heart floods of corruption, that, in 
ordinary ages, slumber on, dark and unseen, in their quiet 
concealment. Then steamed up, as it were from the nether- 
most abysses of hell, strange and hideous errors, that gen- 
erally avoid the light of day, and the world was aghast at the 
open appearance of atheism, and the rejection by a great 



THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 251 

nation, as in mass, of their old ancestral faith. But, as if to 
illustrate his own government of the universe, then, to meet 
this revolt, rose up, from quarters the most distant, and some 
of them the most obscure, designs for good and enterprises 
of benevolence, of which the world had long seen no parallel. 
The Foreign Missions of the Christian church, the Sabbath- 
school, the Tract Society itself, and the Bible Society, burst 
up, as in quick succession, and ere the carnival of the pit was 
ended, and while Satan seemed yet triumphing in his antici- 
pated conquest of the world to impiety, the Christian faith 
received a fresh impulse, and the cause of the Saviour as- 
sumed an aggressive energy it has never since lost. To this 
period belonged Buchanan and Pearce. In this period Wil- 
berforce published that View of Religion in the higher classes, 
which was, in the judgment of the commentator Scott, the 
noblest protest in favor of the Gospel made for centuries — a 
book that consoled and delighted that eminent statesman 
Burke on his dying bed, and that gave to the church of Christ 
the lamented and beloved author of that immortal Tract 
"The Dairyman's Daughter," Legh Richmond. Pelted by 
Parr with learned Greek, and assailed by the Socinian Bel- 
sham, it went on unimpeded, and did its work. Its influence 
was most decisive, under God, in aiding the great work of 
reform, the effects of which are visible in the middle and 
higher classes of England. Then, too, wrote and labored 
Hannah More, and to the same period may be added Henry 
Martyn. 

All these three were periods of conflict. In the first and 
in the third, political contentions were intermingled with 
religious controversies. Wars and rumors of wars exaspe- 
rated the fierce collisions between rival sects, or the strife 
that was waged between Christianity and those who cast off 
all fear, and mocked to his face their Maker and Judge. 
The second was indeed exclusively a period of religious 
controversy; but the points at issue were so momentous, 
and the zeal exhibited so ardent, that England and America 
were filled with the noise of inquiry and dispute, as the Gos- 
pel went on winning new and glorious triumphs amid fierce 
opposition. There was, as in the apostolic history, a wide 
door opened, and there were also " many opposers," and both 
Whitefield and Wesley were more than once, in Christian 
Britain, on the eve of a summary and ferocious martyrdom. 

All these three eras were then eras of moral revolution* 



252 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 

It is a familiar fact that revolutions produce great characters. 
Their great emergencies awaken feeling and develop talent. 
Some mighty crisis paralyzes the weaker crowd, and sum- 
mons forth the master-spirit who can meet its demands, and 
reveals thus to the world his merits and his powers. And it 
is also true, that, although the highest works of science do 
not issue from such times, the most stirring and popular 
books are often the progeny of such an age of turmoil and 
conflict. These orgasms of feeling, that shoot through the 
whole frame of a nation, may bring out much that is crude 
and extravagant, but they also lead to exertions of more than 
wonted power, and results of more than vulgar splendor. 
The best efforts of the best writers are sometimes traceable 
to the excitement of some such stirring era. Pascal's Pro- 
vincial Letters, in which wit, argument, and eloquence are 
so splendidly blended, and, leaning on each other, group 
themselves around the cross of Christ, could not have been 
produced in the holiday leisure of some peaceful era. It 
needed the fierce controversies in which Jansenism lay bleed- 
ing under the feet of triumphant Jesuitism, and struggling 
as for its life, while it testified, as from the dust, in behalf 
of many of the great truths of the Gospel — it needed, we say, 
such a conflict and such a peril to draw out a production so 
impassioned and so powerful even from the mighty heart and 
the massive intellect of a Pascal. 

There are works that seemingly can exist only as the birth 
of the throes and death-pangs of some great era of change 
and moral renovation. Such were the three eras to which 
we have alluded, and their character was imprinted on many 
of the works they produced, and which this Society reprints 
and disseminates. No other age, no lighter emergency 
could have called forth such intellectual strength and such 
depth of feeling, and made the volumes so well fitted as they 
are to tell upon the heart of an entire nation. Works then 
written have the energy of the conflict, and breathe for ever 
its strong passions. Their words are often battles. Had 
Bunyan never inhabited a dungeon, we question whether the 
Pilgrim's Progress would have had its beautiful pictures of 
the land of Beulah, a land of freedom, light, and beauty, and 
we doubt whether that allegory had ever existed. Had Bax- 
ter never been an army chaplain, who must talk strong truths 
in plain terms, we question whether his works would have 
had all their passionate energy and their strong simplicity. 



THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 253 

With regard, therefore, to those portions of the Society's 
publications which proceed from American authors, their 
origin is some evidence in favor of their adaptedness to our 
peculiar wants. With regard to all those works of British 
origin that came from either of the great eras upon which 
we have remarked, we have in favor of their influence not 
only the character of the writers, but the character of the 
age in which they wrote and did battle for the truth of God 
as they believed it. 

Taking now the literature of the Society, as prepared for 
this country in mass, we find in it evidently a variety and 
fulness of subjects that would seem to meet the varied de- 
mands of the church and the nation. For missionary litera- 
ture, it has the memoirs of Brainerd, Buchanan, Schwartz, 
Henry Martyn, and Harriet Winslow. Does a pastor seek 
to train his flock to higher devotedness, where could be found 
a better manual than Baxter's Saints' Everlasting Rest, writ- 
ten, as it would seem, under the golden sky of the Delectable 
Mountains, and in full sight of the Celestial City ? Where 
better companions than the biographies of Leighton, and 
Payson and Pearce, and J. Brainerd Taylor? Against infi- 
delity we have Bogue — the work that was read, and with 
some considerable impressions of mind, by Napoleon, in his 
last days — and Morison, and Keith, and the treatises of Leslie 
and Watson, while others, on the same subject of Christian 
evidences, commend themselves as the works of writers who 
were themselves recovered from infidelity, as the writings 
of Lyttelton, West, Jenyns, and our countryman Nelson. 
There is provision for every age : for the child, the Society 
has furnished the touching biographies of Nathan Dickerman, 
John Mooney Mead, and Mary Lothrop, with the juvenile 
works of Gallaudet, and some of those by the Abbotts. For 
those who love profound thought it has Foster, and for the 
lovers of brilliant imagination and glowing eloquence, the 
German Krummacher. Of the Non-conformists and of the 
contemporaries of Edwards, we have already spoken. Few 
writers of our time have caught so successfully, on some 
pages, the spirit of Baxter as J. G. Pike, three of whose 
works the Society republishes. As models of usefulness in 
the various walks of life, and in either sex, we have the bi- 
ographies of Normand Smith, the example of the Christian 
tradesman ; and of Harlan Page, the private church-member 
laboring for souls ; of Kiipin, of Hannah Hobbie, and of 



254 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 

Caroline Hyde. The child just tottering from its cradle is 
met by the Society with the half-cent Scripture Alphabet ; 
while, for the last stages of human life, they have Burder's 
Sermons to the Aged, printed in type that suits it to the 
dimmer eyes of old age. Furnished at every variety of price, 
and in every form and size, as are the Tracts of the Society, 
the Christian traveller who would scatter the seed of truth 
as he journeys, and the Christian father who would furnish 
his children with a library of devout and wise authors ; the 
Christian minister who would train himself and others to 
higher devotedness and usefulness ; the Christian mother 
desiring aid to order her useful charge aright, and the young 
disciple requiring a guide to the formation of a character of 
intelligence and consistent piety — all find their wants met. 
Against Romanism and intemperance the Society have fur- 
nished a quiver of polished arrows in their bound volumes 
of Tracts on each subject, in addition to the separate volume 
of Beecher on the one, and of the lamented Nevins on the 
other. They have Mason's Spiritual Treasury for the family 
altar and the closet ; and for the pilgrim gathering up his 
feet into his couch to die, they have the Dying Thoughts of 
Baxter. They leave behind, after the funeral ceremony has 
been performed, the Manual of Christian Consolation, by 
Flavel the Non-conformist, and Cecil the Churchman. They 
instruct the active Christian with Cotton Mather's " Essays 
to do Good," the book that won the praise and aided to form 
the usefulness of our own Franklin. They assail the covet- 
ous and hard-handed professor with the burning energy and 
eloquence of Harris' Mammon. But the time fails to review 
separately all the varied themes of their publications and the 
varied channels through which they are prepared to pour the 
same great lesson of Christ the only Saviour, the Sovereign 
and the Pattern of his people. 

3. But what evidence have we that these volumes are fit- 
ted for the present generation of men in other lands ? 
Many, then, of this class of publications are written by mis- 
sionaries abroad, conversant with the field they till, and 
anxiously and prayerfully addressing themselves to its wants. 
In Burmah and Siam, in India and in China, the Society is 
thus assailing the favorite idols and delusions of the heathen, 
in the manner which men who have given their lives to the 
work deem most suitable. The Society is thus, at the same 
time, proclaiming the Gospel before the car of Juggernaut 



THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 255 

and around the Areopagus where Paul preached ; and many 
of their Tracts have already been blessed, to the conversion 
of the readers, and to shake, in the minds of thousands be- 
sides, the old traditional idolatry received from their fore- 
fathers. 

Others of these compositions are translations of works 
written in England or America, and many of them are in the 
number of the Society's English publications. It may, to 
some minds, seem very doubtful that any work, prepared 
originally for the Christians of Great Britain, 01 our own 
land, can, by any possibility, be intelligible or useful to hea- 
then nations trained under different influences and strangers 
to our modes of thought and expression. 

But it should be remembered, that the good effects of some 
of these translations have been put beyond doubt by the tes- 
timony of missionaries as to the interest they have excited, 
and even by the conversion of some of the heathen. One 
of the works of Baxter — we believe it was his Call — was 
translated in his lifetime by our own Eliot for the use of his 
Indian converts ; and a youth, the son of one of their chiefs, 
continued reading the work with tears on his death-bed. 
The pastor who talked to the carpet-weavers of Kiddermin- 
ster could, it seems, speak as well to the savage hunters and 
fishermen of Natick and of Martha's Vineyard. The Dairy- 
man's Daughter was early translated into Russian by a prin- 
cess of that country, and has been acceptable and useful. 
The freeborn English maiden that lived and died amid the 
delightful scenery of the Isle of Wight has told her tale 
effectively to the serfs and amid the snows of Russia. Ful- 
ler's Great Question Answered, another of the Society's 
Tracts, was crowned with striking success in a Danish ver- 
sion, and it was found that the pastor of the inland English 
village of Kettering was still a powerful preacher in the new 
garb and tongue that had been given him for the inhabitants 
of Copenhagen. Others have gone yet further. We name 
the Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan as an illustration, because 
none of the religious works of Europe has been so widely 
translated. In English, the Society has printed it not only 
in the ordinary style, but in the raised and tangible charac- 
ters used by the blind. Little did the tinker of Elstow ever 
dream that his matchless allegory should ever be translated 
into the tongue of the false prophet Mahomet. Yet it has 
appeared in Arabic ; and Joseph Wolff, in his travels in Ye- 



256 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 

men, distributed copies of the version in that ancient and 
widely-spoken language. In seven at least, if not in more, 
of the dialects of India, it has made its appearance ; in the 
Oriya, the Tamul, the Hindustani or Urdu, the Mahrathi, 
the Malay, the Bengali, and very recently in the Burman. 

Fears, at the time when an Indian translation was first 
proposed, that its European ideas and imagery would be un- 
intelligible to the native of the East, led a popular female 
writer to prepare in its stead her pilgrim of India, with its 
Hindoo phrases and metaphors. But the original Pilgrim 
has been permitted now to speak, and he has spoken not in 
vain. The number of the London Evangelical Magazine for 
the present month, (Oct. 1842,) contains the memoir of 
Daniel, a Hindoo convert, written by himself. From this it 
appears that the work of Bunyan was a powerful instrument 
in his conversion : " At this period a gentleman put into my 
hand a book called the Pilgrim's Progress, which I read. 
Partly by reading this book, and partly by the remembrance 
of all the labor which had been expended on me at Coimba- 
toor, I began to feel that the Christian religion was the only 
true religion, and that Christ was the only sinless Saviour." 
This was, probably, the Tamul version. 

A translation was made by the British missionaries into 
the Malagasy language, for the use of the Christian con- 
verts whom God granted to their labors in the island of Mad- 
agascar. Of the hold which the volume took upon their 
hearts, we may judge from the language of the letters ad- 
dressed by some of these converts to their missionary pastors 
when expelled from the island : " We are impressed and 
delighted when we read the Pilgrim's Progress." And at a 
still later day, when the storm of persecution beat yet more 
heavily upon them, and some were executed for the profes- 
sion of their faith, it is said that while awaiting death they 
felt inexpressible peace and joy, and said one to another, 
" Now are we in the situation of Christian and Faithful, 
when they were led to the city of Vanity Fair." A Euro- 
pean book, thus quoted by African martyrs when about to 
die, must be of singular merit. 

The same book has been translated into Finnish, for the 
use of the region verging on Lapland, and printed in Dutch, 
for the use of the missions in South Africa. A version has 
been made into Hawaiian at the Sandwich Islands ; and one 



THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 257 

in Tahitian, for the Society Islands, though we do not know 
that the latter has as yet been published. 

A book which could thus interest the fur-clad peasantry of 
the frozen North in their smoky huts, and the tawny Caffre 
or Hottentot in the midst of his sandy, sunburnt plains ; 
which delights in the cabins of our own West and in the far 
Hindustan, must have some elements that fit it for use every 
where. The nature of man is one in all climes. Conscience 
may be drugged and mutilated, but its entire extirpation seems 
impossible, and it lives under the pressure of error and amid 
torpor, to witness for truth, and right, and God, in quarters 
where our unbelief and fear would expect to find it, if not 
utterly wanting, at least utterly inert. The same heart beats 
under the tattooed skin of the New Zealander as under the 
grease and ochre with which the Tambookie of South Africa 
delights to adorn his person, under the silks of the Chinaman 
and the furs of the Laplander. It has every where the same 
depravity, that no grade of civilization or refinement can so 
adorn as to lift beyond the need of the renewing gospel, and 
that no brutalism can so degrade as to put below the reach 
of the same efficacious remedy. Religion, it should be re- 
membered again, is not mere abstract speculation ; it is also 
emotion. With the heart man believeth. Now science and 
literature, strictly so called, may be an affair of certain civ- 
ilized nations, and of them only ; but poetry and passion are 
of all lands and of all kindreds of the earth. And how largely 
do these enter into the structure of the Gospel, of the book 
revealing that Gospel, and of all Christian writings modelled 
upon that Bible. There are, it must be allowed, in the pro- 
duction of Banyan's genius, excellences and peculiarities 
that do not exist to an equal extent in many of the other 
publications of the Society, adapting it to interest mankind 
in every grade of civilization and under all the varieties of 
custom and taste that culture or neglect, error or truth may 
have produced. Yet it will, in all probability, be found, 
when the trial shall have been made by competent transla- 
tors, that many other of the favorite books of British and 
American Christians are fitted to become nearly as much the 
favorites of the converts whom the grace of God shall gather 
in the ancient East, or in the islands of the sea. 

Our hope, that much of the literature of European or 
American origin may thus become at once available for the 
spiritual wants of the converts from heathenism, rests not on 

34 



258 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 

the peculiar talent of the works so much as on their subject 
and structure. Their theme is Jesus Christ, the character 
and the history devised by infinite wisdom, with the express 
intention of winning its way to the sympathies of man, under 
all the varieties of complexion, caste, language, laws and lit- 
erature. This theme has proved its power to exorcise super- 
stitions the most foul and inveterate, and to raise from the 
deepest and most hopeless degradation. Pervaded and sat- 
urated as so many of the Society's works are with this sub^ 
ject, we have confidence that the divine grandeur of the theme 
will, to some extent, compensate for the defects of the human 
authorship. The idols of all lands shall totter from their 
shrines, and yet be broken before its might ; and we look 
for the shattering of all by the faithful and full presentation 
of this truth, Christ and him crucified — a truth that is to be 
the great iconoclast principle of the age ; for it is God's 
own device, and carries with it God's own promise and the 
irresistible energy of his benediction. 

We have reason, again, to expect the adaptation of much 
of the religious literature of our own country and Britain to 
the wants of the foreign missionary, from its close assimila- 
tion to the character of the Scripture. This is a book carry- 
ing one of the evidences of its divine origin upon it, in its 
power of interesting all grades of society and all ages of 
mankind. Far as any religious writer becomes penetrated 
by its spirit, and transfuses, as many of the Society's authors 
have done, its imagery and train of thought into his own 
compositions, so far he prepares them for acceptableness and 
favor among every tribe of mankind. If the Scriptures look 
with special favor on any class of our race, it is on the East- 
ern portion of the world. The Bible is an Oriental book, as 
far as it is the book of any one region or race. It would 
have been, in style and imagery, a very different volume had 
the Anglo-Saxon race been left to prepare it. And as far as 
it should have partaken of their marked peculiarities it would 
have been less fitted for one great errand it has in this age 
to accomplish. The missions of our times are pouring back 
from the favored West and from the tents of Japheth the 
light of salvation on the long-neglected habitations of Shem, 
its original scats, and upon the millions of the East. It is 
some advantage, then, that we go to them with a book that, 
if it favor any class, is more Eastern than Western in char- 
acter ; and that we carry with the Bible a biblical literature 



THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 259 

that, from the book on which it has been founded, has, in 
many of its specimens, caught a tinge of similar feelings, and 
imagery, and style. 

In that body of religious literature whose evangelical and 
practical character we have thus imperfectly examined, the 
Society have done much. But it would be doing them and 
their objects gross injustice to suppose that they present it 
as a complete body of religious reading for all the wants of 
the age. Its publications may have some inequality of merit. 
What collection is otherwise ? The lingering and fltiul 
charities of the churches may forbid their enlarging it as they 
desire, and as the wants of our own and foreign lands require. 
The Non-conformist literature has many volumes they would 
gladly add to their existing collection. There are two other 
great eras of religious conflict and effort, from the literature 
of which the London Tract Society has drawn largely, and 
this institution as yet not at all. We allude to the era of 
the stormy infancy of the Scottish National Church, and the 
works of its Rutherford, its Guthrie, its Binning, its Andrew 
Gray, and its Durham. The other greater and earlier era 
is that of the English Reformation. Of the works of the 
English reformers our British brethren have published sev- 
eral volumes. As to the present availableness of this latter 
literature, we are aware that there is division of opinion ; but 
its history would be valuable, if not its remains. 

Nor is the American Tract Society to be judged as if it 
had completed its own designs, or finished its mission as 
respects a native religious literature. Its power to elicit 
works drawn up with peculiar reference to our position and 
habits as a people, has as yet been shown but in a small de- 
gree. The churches of this country are capable of much 
more, and need much more ; and if duly sustained, the So- 
ciety may proceed in this work to a point far beyond the 
limit of its present attainments. Will the churches afford 
this aid ? Here, at least, they will have — if they choose, by 
prayer, and effort, and liberality, to secure it — they will have 
a literature all that they can wish, as to its national adaptation. 

And if our country and others that have been long favored 
with the serene and pure light of the Gospel, are yet to 
know days of dark and stormy controversy with error ; if 
over the once peaceful encampments of our churches is 
spreading the hum that betokens an approaching combat ; 
if, as some fear, we are entering, in our times, upon a stern 



260 THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 

and close conflict with Romanism or with scepticism, or with 
both ; or are to stand up for our national morals and national 
existence against the floods of a frivolous and profligate lit- 
erature, that now drowns the minds of our youth as beneath 
a rushing deluge of inanity, and filth, and venom, we have| 
little fear as to the result. We cannot distrust the powers 
and the triumphs of Scripture, the safety and ultimate vic- 
tories of the Church. In the God of the Bible and the Head 
of the Church, we need not fear to place the most unques- 
tioning and imperturbable confidence. He who gave the 
Bible will guard the gift ; and he who built will watch, as 
with a wall of fire, around the city of his own chosen Jeru- 
salem. And, from all the past history of the Church, we 
augur that out of this or any other conflict that maybe await- 
ing us in the interval between our times and the final glory 
of Christ's kingdom, there may grow some of the richest 
productions of that literature which the Church is yet to 
enjoy ; a literature as yet unwritten, and which this institu- 
tion, we trust, will, with others, aid in educing, diffusing, and 
perpetuating. Some of the richest legacies which sanctified 
genius has ever bequeathed to the Christian church, are like 
that more cherished portion which the dying patriarch gave 
to his favorite son, his Joseph : " One portion above thy 
brethren, which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with 
my sword and with my bow ;" the spoils plucked as out of 
the very teeth of the destroyer, the trophies of a late and 
hard-won victory. 



INCREASE OP FAITH NECESSARY TO THE SUC- 
CESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 

"But having hope, when your faith is increased, that we 

bhall be enlarged by you according to our rule abundantly, to 
preach the gospel in the regions beyond you." — 2 coi*. x. 15, 16. 

The language of the Apostle evidently implies a gentle 
reprehension of the Corinthian church. The poverty and 
imbecility of their faith embarrassed him in his ardent aspi- 
rations after more extended usefulness. He was anxious to 
enter upon a new field, and to proclaim the Gospel through- 
out other and more destitute regions. But he must await in 
prayerful hope the increase of their faith, and at their hands 
expect an enlargement. This enlargement might be, on 
their part, an advancement and confirmation in Christian 
doctrine, which should permit him to transfer the charge of 
these, his children in the faith, into the hands of less skilful 
pastors ; or a rapid growth in Christian holiness, which should 
justify the Apostle in presenting them as his epistle, to be 
seen and read of all men, attesting alike the power of the 
Gospel, and the reality of his mission. Or he might desire 
the vindication of his own apostolical character, which had 
been cruelly assailed in their midst, and ask the transmission 
of his name, with its well-won honors, to the neighboring 
heathen. Or it had been, perhaps, his hope, from their lib- 
erality and wealth, to have received aid in his missionary 
journeyings ; or he had anticipated from their position in a 
great commercial metropolis, assistance in their sending the 
Gospel to other havens and cities of the empire. Whether 
he expected from their increased and matured faith, any one, 
or the union of all these advantages, and whatever be the 
decision as to the mode in which enlargement was sought by 
him, one fact stands forth on the face of these words, mani- 
fest and unquestionable. He was now fettered in his plans 
of benevolence, and it was from the Corinthian disciples that 



262 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 

he expected his release. Either from their confirmation in 
the truths he preached, or in the holiness he enjoined and 
exemplified ; or from their assertion of his just honors as an 
apostle ; from the bestowment of their free alms, or the em- 
ployment of their mercantile influence, he hoped to obtain the 
removal of the restraint from himself, and to secure for their 
pagan neighbors blessings untold and priceless. The ful- 
filment of his hope depended upon their progress to higher 
attainments in faith. There is involved, then, in these words 
of an inspired and most successful missionary, a principle 
which we would now endeavor to bring before you, that 

The missionaries of the church require at her hands, for 
the extension and success of their efforts, an increase of 
faith. 

Looking to the divisions and scandals he had so sternly 
rebuked, and to the peculiar temptations of the infant church, 
which had been gathered amid the luxury, gayety, and profli- 
gacy of the licentious Corinth, we might have expected, from 
one versed as was Paul in the weakness of our nature, and 
in the wiles of its great adversary, that he would have chosen 
to specify, instead of the one evil of unbelief, other and nu- 
merous impediments to his success. And using the term 
here employed by him, as we too often do, to describe a 
knowledge merely speculative and theoretical, we should 
have supposed that in a community indoctrinated by the per- 
sonal labors of an apostle, as well as in the churches of our 
own age and land, the deficiencies of Christians were to be 
sought, rather in their works of obedience, than in the amount 
of their faith. Yet such was not the fact then. Such is not 
the root of the evil now. It is in faith that we are wanting. 
The elder and parent grace is maimed and infirm, and the 
whole family and sisterhood of the Christian virtues languish 
as she decays, and can be reanimated only by her restoration. 
Having considered, therefore, 

I. The nature and importance of true faith, 

II. The intimate connexion between its higher de- 
grees AND THE MISSIONARY EFFORTS OF THE CHURCH Will 

naturally follow and prepare us to examine, 

III. The defective faith of our own churches, as 

INTERPOSING A HINDERANCE TO THE TRIUMPHS OF THE GOS- 
PEL OVER HEATHENISM. 

And may the Father of lights, by His own Spirit of illu- 
mination and power, unfold to the mind, and impress upon 



TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 263 

the heart, the humbling but the salutary truth contained in 
these words. 

I. The importance of faith may be discerned from the 
dignity and rank assigned it throughout the New Testament. 
In the commencement and at the close of our Saviour's min- 
istry ; in his own private conference with the anxious, but 
irresolute Nicodemus, and in the public message with which 
his apostles were charged, as he sent them forth to the evan- 
gelization of the world, it is alike represented as the only 
mode — the one condition of salvation. He that exercises it 
is not condemned, while he that believeth not shall be damned. 
To this principle is ascribed our immunity from the terrors 
of the law, for we are justified by faith. As a shield, it re- 
pels the fiery darts of temptation that come from the great 
adversary of God and man ; while within, it purifies the 
heart, working by love ; and, in our contest with the ungodly 
precepts and example of our fellow-men, " this is the victory 
that overcometh the world, even our faith." The long and 
glorious list of its strifes and its trophies, contained in the 
closing portion of the Epistle to the Hebrews, commences 
with the announcement that faith is the substance of things 
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen ; and is terminated 
with the triumphant recapitulation that all these, the worthies 
of the earlier dispensations, obtained their good report through 
the same simple, but mighty principle — that of faith. 

And although the world are accustomed to dispute the 
necessity of this principle, when exercised respecting the 
realities of a world as yet hidden and invisible, they are per- 
petually employing it with regard to the visible but transient 
scenery of the present life. Compelled to give their faith to 
testimony as to those things which might be seen, and often 
giving it even where they might substitute personal observa- 
tion for faith in the evidence of others ; they refuse to extend 
it to those objects which, from their very nature, cannot be- 
come the subjects of immediate vision and examination. 
Yielding credence to the testimony of their fellow-mortals, 
though the witnesses are alike fallible and perfidious, they 
refuse it to the revelation of their God. Preferring to give 
it where it is often not required, (did they choose to employ 
their own natural faculties,) they withhold it where it is 
inevitably necessary. All the commerce of this world is 
predicated on the faith which man puts in the skill, integrity, 
and diligence of his fellow-man ; and a writing, of which he 



264 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 

never saw the author, shall be to him a sufficient warrant for 
transmitting, far beyond his own sight and control, his whole 
property. By the exercise of a just and sober faith in the 
testimony brought into her halls, the national jurisprudence 
administers to our citizens the redress of their wrongs, and 
the punishment of their crimes. The learning dispensed in 
our colleges is, by the mass of minds, received without per- 
sonal examination, upon the credit given to the ability and 
honesty of previous investigators. And all education, whether 
in the most recondite science, or in the most humble and 
handicraft art, proceeds upon the faith which the pupil is 
required to exercise in the superior skill of his instructor, 
and in the value of the knowledge his teacher is preparing 
to communicate. 

It is only by the confidence they have learned to place in 
the narratives of the traveller, that the majority of society 
know the nature and extent of the country, of which they are 
themselves the inhabitants ; or that they can form any idea 
of the great and magnificent cities, the goodly prospects, and 
the splendid wonders that adorn some foreign and unseen 
coast. And with regard to the facts which we have thus 
gathered, we feel no suspicion, but use them as the current 
coin of the mind, both in our private meditations and our 
social intercourse, without fear as to their genuineness and 
validity. Even the sceptic, loud and boisterous in his rejec- 
tion of all faith, as being an invasion of the province, and but 
a usurpation upon the rights of human reason, is most rigid 
and constant in exacting from his trembling child an obedi- 
ence to his will, and a subjection to his opinions, which can 
rest only upon the faith, the tacit but implicit faith, which he 
requires his family to exercise in his superior wisdom and 
larger experience. 

And if it be objected, that the faith of the gospel diffeis 
widely from that which we so readily and commonly render, 
in that it brings to our minds deep and difficult mysteries, we 
answer that it would be less evidently the work of God, if it 
did not come, contradicting the first and rasher conclusions 
of human ignorance. It would be a departure from the an- 
alogy which exists among all the works of our God, did it 
only reveal what man had previously conjectured, and were 
Faith employed merely to endorse and register, in silent ac- 
quiescence, the rescripts which had been prepared for her 
by human reason. And even in the sciences of this world, 



TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 265 

narrow and near as is the field of their labors, there are the 
same inscrutable yet inevitable difficulties, of which the scep- 
tic complains in religion. We expect it of a cultivated and 
advanced science, that it should assail and overturn many 
opinions, which to the first glance of ignorant presumption 
seem indisputable truths. Contradicting the first and incom- 
plete testimony of our senses and the general impressions of 
mankind, Geography comes back from her voyages of dis- 
covery with the annunciation that the earth is not an extended 
plain, but one vast sphere. And though the eye sees no 
motion, and the foot feels no unsteadiness, and no Jarring is 
perceived within or around us, Astronomy comes back to 
the inquirer with the startling assurance, that, notwithstanding 
all these seeming evidences to the contrary, the earth on 
which he reposes is ceaselessly and most rapidly whirling 
along its trackless path in the heavens ; and that, moment 
by moment, he is borne along through the fields of space 
with a fearful and inconceivable velocity. And when, from 
further wanderings, but on better testimony — when from a 
higher and stranger world, but with fuller evidence and with 
more indubitable tokens of her veracity, Faith comes back, 
bringing assurances that tally not in all things with our pre- 
conceived conjectures, shall she be chidden and blasphemed 
for the difficulties that arise from our own ignorance ? Without 
the mysteries of. the Gospel, revelation would be unlike all 
the other provinces of human knowledge, and the domains 
of Faith would be dissimilar from all the rest of the handi- 
work of God. 

But although the importance of faith is thus apparent from 
the rank assigned it in the scriptures, and from its necessity 
even in the petty concernments of this present life, we shall 
learn to appreciate true belief yet more highly, when we see 
mankind, by a heedless but perpetual infatuation, allowing 
themselves in errors the most absurd and dangerous, with 
regard to its character and claims. By some it is confounded 
with a blind and irrational credulity, although evangelical 
faith is based only on evidence the most satisfactory and suf- 
ficient ; and although the book of God, when demanding our 
credence, proffers to the inquirer testimony, not merely abun- 
dant, but overwhelming, as to the nature of its authorship. 
It is as adverse to the character of scriptural faith to believe 
without a divine warrant, upon authority that is merely tra- 
ditionary and human, as to refuse the assent of the soul where 

35 



266 L INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 

God has spoken. True Faith is not more allied to supersti- 
tion than she is to scepticism ; and, determined as he is to 
believe all that God has testified, the Christian, wherever 
the oracle is silent, suspends his decision, and anxiously ex- 
cludes from his creed all the inventions of man, whether they 
come from the school, the synod, or the council. 

Others delight to speak of faith in the religion of our Lord, 
as if it were but an opinion, and the religion it embraces but 
a hypothesis, of little practical moment or influence : while 
on the contrary, the faith of the Gospel is as rigid and exper- 
imental in its character as the strictest science of the schools. 
It makes no arbitrary assumptions, rests on no disputed axi- 
oms, but, upon the foundation of facts of the most impressive 
and varied character, it builds up, patiently and surely, its 
doctrines and its precepts ; invites the most searching scrutiny 
into the testimonials which it adduces ; and having by them 
established its first principles, gives not only for its funda- 
mental axioms, but for its every inference, and for each sub- 
sequent deduction, the word of a God. As well might we 
call arithmetic or history a mere theory, as to apply that title 
to the religion which is embraced by our faith. Do the self- 
satisfied philosophers of this world tell us of the necessity of 
facts ? We answer, the incarnation, the personal character, 
the crucifixion and resurrection of the Saviour, are facts most 
fully proved, and standing alone, would be in themselves 
sufficient to prove the divinity of the revelation that is en- 
twined about them, and of which they constitute the central 
supports, the chief and favorite theme. And every convert, 
ransomed by the power of this faith from the tyranny of evil 
habits, affords in himself a new fact, augmenting the mass of 
her evidences, and swelling her far-spreading and splendid 
"cloud of witnesses." 

Nor are those men safer or wiser than the undisguised 
scoffer, who, professing to receive the religion of the Bible, 
flatter themselves that a mere assent of the understanding to 
the historical portions of the record, constitutes that faith 
which shall justify at the bar, and admit them to the heaven 
of Jehovah. The Bible is to be regarded as a whole, and 
as such is to be received and obeyed. The Gospel is a code 
of laws, no less than a volume of annals. It has not only 
narratives, but precepts, and asks the consent of the whole 
man, and his entire soul, to its undivided and unmutihited 
Contents. And as that man could not maintain his arrogant 



TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 267 

pretensions, who should claim the honors of devoted patriotism 
merely because he had studied intently the annals of his 
country's history, whilst he was trampling upon her laws, 
and imprinting every leaf of her statute-book with the hoof 
of swinish indulgence, thus must the man fail of sustaining 
his claim to the character of Christ's disciple, who, professing 
to credit and revere his record, treads down into the mire his 
laws, and has but the faith of historical assent for the narra- 
tive, without the faith of love for the precepts, and the faith 
of affectionate conformity for the character of the Saviour. 
The Bible contains not only the story of our creation, ruin, 
and recovery, but it includes as well the indictment of our 
crimes, and the proclamation of our pardon ; and there is no 
tjue reception of the history, unless there be also, personally, 
the humble confession of the imputed guiltiness, and the 
grateful pleading of the proffered discharge. 

Equally erroneous, and chargeable with a kindred folly, is 
the man, who, passing beyond the vain figment of a faith 
merely historical, professes to receive the whole system of 
revelation, in its doctrinal, no less than its narrative portions, 
and triumphing in the orthodoxy of his tenets, seems anxious 
to shelter himself from the practical influence of faith, by 
pleading the freeness of the salvation it brings. The whole 
necessity of salvation grew out of the practical depravity of 
man's nature, and the whole errand of the Bible was but the 
restoration of practical holiness. For this end prophets and 
apostles wrote ; for this it was that a Saviour descended and 
bled — rose, and reigns, to furnish, to bestow, and to fulfil that 
Bible. And until this effect be wrought, nothing is gained ; 
and if this be refused, the very object and intention of the 
religion is rejected. It is surely vain toil to implant in the 
mind a faith, the vital germ of which is carefully removed, a 
dead root, which shall never send forth the springing leaf, or 
bear the ripened fruit. 

An error now popular, and not less fatal, is one which the 
sceptic has borrowed from the armory and champions of the 
truth. It consists in a perversion of the great scriptural truth, 
that it is God who worketh in us to will and to do, and that 
all our thoughts are under his control. Using the theological 
labors of Edwards for a purpose, which that holy and master 
mind never intended, the advocates of this dangerous error 
contend that our belief is beyond our control, that faith is not 
voluntary, and unbelief is therefore not criminal : forgetting, 



268 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 

that, though a gift of God, faith is withal an act or habit of 
the human mind ; that, like every other virtue, it is on the one 
hand, a boon of heaven, and on the other, the exercise of 
unfettered human agency — that it is the natural result of 
evidence duly and impartially considered, and that no man 
can be guiltless who wilfully turns away from the contempla- 
tion of that evidence. The religion of God asks but a ver- 
dict according to the weight of proof which she brings. To 
prevent the admission of that evidence, or wilfully to pro- 
nounce a decision against its weighty and sufficient testimony, 
would not be deemed guiltless in any cause that should be 
brought before an earthly tribunal ; nor shall it be held a 
venial offence at the bar, and by the laws of an insulted 
Deity. 

From the errors which human perverseness has invented 
to obscure the character of faith, we turn to review its true 
nature and office. It is most simple, as much so as the con- 
fidence of a prattling child in his father's kindness and wis- 
dom ; yet at the same time as expansive in its views, as the 
loftiest science that ever tasked the powers of a created intel- 
lect. It is but a hearty assent to the whole testimony of 
God — a submission of the entire soul, not of the intellect 
only, but also of the affections and the imagination, to the 
testimony of God ; whether that testimony be employed in 
prescribing a duty, or in establishing a privilege. It is the 
acknowledgment of human ignorance, united with the pro- 
fession of confidence in Divine wisdom, and of subjection to 
Divine authority. Making no reservations, prescribing no 
terms of limitation, claiming no power of revoking or abridg- 
ing its grant, it is a surrender of the intelligent spirit to the 
word of God as its rule and its stay ; in conformity to it as 
the one standard of human conduct, and in dependence upon 
it as the only fitting nutriment of the spiritual life. It thus 
restores again the communication which at the fall was sev-j 
ered. In his temptation Satan persuaded our parents to 
discredit the testimony of God ; and the consequent inter- 
ruption of faith was the hewing away of that channel, through 
which they had heretofore received from their God know- 
ledge, truth, and love. The human mind became at once an 
exhausted and rifted reservoir, " a broken cistern," into which 
no longer welled the outgushing streams from " the Foun- 
tain of living waters." By faith the communion is restored, 
and man is again the dependent and pupil of his God. 



TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 269 

It is his natural and rightful state, not for this life only, but 
forever. The apostle, when enumerating the graces that 
abide, has spoken of faith as if it too continued. Indeed, the 
very nature of a created and limited intelligence, involves the 
necessity of continued faith. Long as we are not omnipres- 
ent, and cannot perceive with our own eyes what is every 
where transacted — long as we are not omniscient, and there 
are portions of knowledge, which we have not yet acquired — ■ 
long as man is not invested with the attributes of the Deity, 
so long must we depend upon His testimony for the truth of 
that which He has seen and we have not seen ; so long must 
\ve learn from Him the nature of that which He has known, 
but which we may know only from his words. The perfec- 
tion of the heavenly world does not imply illimitable know- 
ledge, either as to the present or the future ; and as to all 
those portions of God's ways, which thus remain concealed 
from our personal examination, the spirits of just men made 
perfect will, with their first-born brethren, the angels that 
have kept their original estate, remain the pensioners of 
faith, dependent upon the declarations of God for continual 
instruction. 

And how glorious are the objects which faith brings into 
the mind of man, even during his sojourn here. He learns 
from her the secret of his own misery and guiltinesss, and its 
remedy. He is told of a law condemning irrevocably for the 
first offence, yet now fully satisfied for his hourly infraction 
of its precepts — a Saviour divine to redeem and human to 
compassionate — a salvation not of his own procurement — ■ 
the Spirit of God descended to be his teacher and consoler — 
troubles sanctified — snares broken — and an eternity of purity 
and blessedness made his certain inheritance ; and are not 
these truths of surpassing splendor and inestimable worth ? 
They enter into the soul, not so much destroying as be-dwarf- 
ing its former ideas, and the original furniture of the mind, 
which it has obtained from the knowledge and literature of 
this world. Faith has suddenly widened the mental horizon, 
letting in the vision of realities before present, but hitherto 
unseen. Or rather, as has been beautifully said, it is the 
floating into view of another and a lovelier world, with its 
glories and its harmony drowning the din and beclouding the 
splendor of these terrestrial scenes. 

The believer judges by a new standard ; sees by a new and 
heaven-descended light ; and lo, in the change, " all things 



270 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 

have become new." And though the men of this world may 
question and deride the renovation, because the man's earthly 
condition, and the powers of his mind remain apparently the 
same ; it is evident to those who will reason, that the man is 
essentially renewed ; for his views, his feelings, his hopes 
and fears, his prospects and his purposes, his conduct and 
language, have undergone a marked and strange modification. 
True it is, the man's garb is still coarse, and his person un- 
gainly, and his mind is not graced with the refinements and 
adornments of education ; but the change is as yet merely 
initial. Death and the resurrection shall consummate it. 
And even already the internal process is to his own mind 
alike evident and delightful ; and with tears of gratitude he 
receives it as the earnest of that thorough renovation, which 
shall transform him, body, soul, and spirit, into the likeness 
of his Lord. Thus might we imagine an aged and lonely 
cottager, musing at nightfall in his desolate home upon the 
partner of his bosom, now tenanting the grave, and his chil- 
dren, who have long since wandered from his hearth to a 
distant land, and are there regardless or ignorant of the sor- 
rows with which his declining years are darkened. And as 
he cowers over his scanty fire, the unbidden tear will fall, and 
his heart is full of the bitterness of despair. But enter with 
the unexpected tidings that his children live ; that, prospered 
and wealthy, they are yet affectionate ; that their hearts still 
yearn towards their early home and the parent who holds it; 
that they are even now on their way to soothe and gladden 
his few remaining days : and although you have made no 
immediate change in the man's lot — although the hovel is 
yet dark and cold, and the embers emit but the same dull and 
saddening light ; the whole scene is changed to his eyes, and 
instead of its former desolateness, it has become radiant with 
the lustre of his new-found happiness. A new element is 
poured into his mind, and the faith of your message has 
changed his whole soul. Is there no reality, no enjoyment 
in this translation from despondency to hope, from comfort- 
less and unpitied helplessness to the glad expectation of at- 
tached and watchful children? Yes; let his lot remain long 
but what it had been, he feels, and you cannot but feel, that 
the credence given to your tidings has renewed his youth 
within him, and thrown a new coloring over the whole scene 
of squalid poverty that surrounds him. And, if you deny 
not the reality of the happiness because of the absence or 



TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 271 

present delay of any outward change, should you dispute the 
reality of the believer's peace, because as yet he is but the ex- 
pectant heir, and not the joyous possessor, of a heavenly 
mansion ? 

Of a principle thus efficient and delightful, what shall secure 
the preservation and increase ? Divine truth is its aliment, 
and the Holy Spirit its author and upholder. In the lan- 
guage of scripture it will be observed that the term faith, (as 
in the instance of the exhortation to contend earnestly for it, 
as it was once delivered to the saints,) is employed not only 
in the sense above given, but also to describe a system of 
doctrines ; but it is as the food of that spiritual principle 
which we have endeavored to describe. And as the principle 
of life, and the mode or means by which it is sustained, may 
be, and, in common speech, often are confounded ; so is the 
same word used in the New Testament to signify both the 
truth received, and the temper or habit of mind receiving it. 
But the two dissimilar ideas are not to be blended ; nor are 
we to suppose that the form of sound doctrine will necessarily 
insure a living faith in the heart. The experiment, often and 
anxiously repeated, has ever failed. Creeds and confessions 
have been adjusted and balanced with the utmost nicety of 
discrimination, and with the greatest precision of language. 
But in the church at Geneva, planted and watered by the 
cares of Calvin and Beza, and in the English Presbyterians, 
the descendants of the holy non-conformists, it has been but 
too fully proved, that correct symbols of faith may be inher- 
ited from a pious ancestry and for a time be retained with 
great reverence, but without any portion of the indwelling 
spirit which once framed and pervaded them. Indeed, in the 
history of Protestant Germany, it has been found that the 
fallen and corrupted fragments of a traditionary " form of 
sound words," have been most prolific in the production of 
heresies, alike strange and revolting. The fat and heavy soil 
of an inert and " dead orthodoxy," was to that national church 
the hot-bed of scepticism, nurturing errors of the rankest 
growth, and the most deadly nature. The stubble, which had 
well sustained the former and the proper harvest, but served 
to enrich the field for an after-growth of weeds the most nox- 
ious and luxuriant. However useful in its place, (and, pro- 
perly employed, its usefulness is great,) the most correct and 
scriptural creed is but the outward and inanimate portraiture 
of an inward and living faith ; and it is as idle to expect that 



372 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 

confessions and symbols, alone and unaided, should create 
faith, as to imagine that a definition of honesty and benevo- 
lence, rigid and accurate, should of itself be sufficient to re- 
form the inmates of our prisons. 

" Leviathan is not so tamed." 

It is not with such weapons that the enemy is to be van- 
quished, or a living faith perpetuated from age to age. The 
affections, no less than the intellect, must be reached and 
won. The continual interposition of the Holy Spirit, the 
renewed and personal application of truth to the human con- 
science, are requisite to attain the end. And it is only from 
a personal faith, in all her members, thus produced — thus 
fostered — and continually increasing, that the church can 
expect prosperity. It is thus that she is to be prepared for 
conflict with her internal foes, and for the subjugation of new 
territories to the obedience of the cross. From a faith thus 
established and made general, what may not be hoped — 
what conquest shall seem too arduous, and what peril too 
fearful ? 

We have seen the dignity of faith and its simplicity ; the 
errors which misrepresent and assail it ; its nature ; the mag- 
nificence of its effects ; its necessity and eternity ; and the 
mode of its preservation. It remains now to examine, 

II. The intimate connection existing between this 

FAITH AND THE MISSIONARY EFFORTS OF THE CHURCH. 

Having observed that this principle is the source of know- 
ledge, and the parent of motives and feelings to the Christian, 
it is at once evident that the largeness or the narrowness of 
the knowledge thus gained, the weakness or the strength of 
the feelings thus excited, and of the motives which are in this 
mode implanted, will constantly affect the character of all 
the Christian's doings, but especially those which depend most 
upon faith for their inception and completion — his doings in 
behalf of his impenitent fellow-men. \ 

Upon the enterprises of the church, it is immediately ap- 
parent, whether the faith of the believers who compose that 
body is in a state of feebleness and declension, or of energy 
and growth, lie who looks much to the parting command- 
ment of his Lord for the universal proclamation of his truth, 
and much to the repeated assurance of his Lord that his truth 
shall prove itself mighty, and his word not return void, will 
be prepared to hope and to attempt much, in obedience to the 



TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 273 

commandment and in inheritance of the promise. He, on 
the contrary, who sees eternity but indistinctly, seldom and 
afar, and whose faith takes but short and occasional flights 
into the enduring world of realities that surrounds us, will be 
prone to exhibit in his plans timidity and despondency, in 
his efforts remissness and apathy. And if we look to the 
period when the limits of the church were most rapidly and 
widely extended, it will be found not the era when the world- 
ly power, the learning and the wealth of the church were at 
their highest elevation, but in the age when, though lacking 
all these, by the energy of an overmastering faith, she rose 
superior to every impediment, and destitute of all earthly aid 
and encouragement, dared to hope in God. Wise in His 
wisdom, and strong in His might, she devised her plans of 
conquest upon the broad and magnificent basis of the Sa- 
viour's promises, and then, in humility, diligence, and simple 
devotion, called upon the Saviour's faithfulness to accomplish 
the plans His own word had warranted, and His own Spirit 
incited. And in most of the great revivals of faith and god- 
liness in the modern church, it will be discovered that the 
rising flood of religious feeling has opened anew, or found 
and followed the already open channel of missionary enter- 
prise. The revival of religion granted to the early labors of 
the Puritan fathers in New England, saw also the rise of Eliot 
and the Mayhews, the first evangelists of our Indians. The 
energetic faith of Wesley sought for its first field a mission 
to the savages of our southern coast. The era of Edwards, 
when the faith and love of the church received so wide and 
mighty an excitement, was also the era of Brainerd, his friend 
and disciple, a missionary of the rarest endowments. The 
revival of faith in Protestant Germany under Francke, Spener, 
and the Pietists, founded the Orphan House at Halle, and 
saw go forth from its walls Swartz and others, his associates, 
to labor amid the heathenism of India. The accession of 
strength to the faith of the Moravian brethren, by the labors 
of Zinzendorf, soon found an outlet in missionary enterprises 
of apostolical simplicity and successfulness. The established 
church of England, in her recent return to the faith of her 
early founders, has also been aroused to the cause of missions, 
and already rejoices in the record of her Heber, her Bu- 
chanan, and her Martyn. And in our own division of the 
Christian host, the energetic labors of the elder Hall, Fuller, 
and the vouuger Ryland, to restore to the faith of our churches 

36 



274 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 

its proper and practical character, were soon followed by the 
establishment of those missions, which have given, as we 
trust, an impulse to the energies of the church that shall go 
on, with greater extension and deepening intensity, until the 
time of the Messiah's second advent. 

The same increased faith which excites the enterprise, 
serves withal to multiply the resources of the church for the 
successful development and prosecution of the plans she has 
formed. Consecration to God of our hearts and our sub- 
stance will produce a liberality which would, to a lukewarm 
age, seem fanatical and extravagant. Living as in the con- 
stant view of the last judgment ; estranged from the world, 
and thus exempted from the various and costly sacrifices it 
requires to fashion, to pride, and to luxury ; the conscien- 
tious frugality of the church would enable the poorest and the 
richest members to unite in habitual contribution. A. simple- 
hearted faith would banish also from the confines of the church 
that pretended spirituality which anxiously excludes religion 
from the scenes of business, and shuts her out from all inter- 
ference with pecuniary matters, under the pretext of guard- 
ing her sanctity, but in truth for the protection of a hidden 
covetousness. In the better and happier era of her history 
it is found that religion is a familiar and every-day guest, 
visiting not the chamber of social or secret prayer and the 
sanctuary only, but passing through all the scenes of human 
industry, and shedding over every occupation her mild and 
hallowing influence. Systematic contribution to every form 
of religious benevolence, will then be regarded as a necessary 
mark of true piety. But the chief treasures of the church 
are not her stores of silver and gold, but her living members, 
with their spiritual endowments of varied character and 
grades. And how greatly would a revival of primitive faith 
draw upon these her spiritual resources, for the supply of 
the perishing heathen. The missionary cause would not be 
considered as making well nigh its exclusive appeal to min- 
isters of the church ; but the merchant, the artisan, and the 
farmer, each anxious to give himself to the Lord's service, 
would present not a stinted tithe of his earnings, but himself, 
his personal labors, and his life, as an offering to the great 
work of evangelizing the heathen. 

How evident and vast the increase of missionary power 
given to the church, in the influence of a purer and simpler 
faith upon her doctrines. We have viewed incidentally the 



TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 275 

errors that usurp the name of Christian faith. When these 
should have been outgrown and superseded by a true and 
hearty acceptance of God's whole testimony, how immense 
the amount of moral power thrown into benevolent action. 
Again, even where true faith exists, it is now embarrassed in 
its operations by its union with more or less of error. Every 
admixture of human tradition, and each addition of extrane- 
ous and irrelevant authority, has served but to disfigure and 
weaken the truth it was intended to adorn. When these 
cumbrous appendages shall be relinquished, and the oracles 
of truth shall be consulted more habitually in prayer for the 
teachings of the Spirit, what may not be hoped from the 
blessing of that God who is jealous for the honor of His own 
word ? What may not be hoped from the temper and edge 
of the sword of the Spirit, when it shall have been disencum- 
bered of the scabbard, that has so long served only to conceal 
and corrode its brightness 1 

The transition is a natural one from the doctrines of the 
Gospel to the motives which they suggest and sustain. And 
much aid will have been won for urging onward the cause of 
the Saviour in heathen lands, when a higher standard of faith 
shall have trained up the church in greater simplicity of pur- 
pose, and in pure and single-hearted desire for the glory of 
God. How much effort is now lost to the world and the 
church, because polluted by motives which God cannot deign 
to bless. When this transparency of purpose shall become 
prevalent, how strong and general the tendency towards a 
cordial union of all Christians in the common cause. How 
much of the time and strength of brethren is now wasted upon 
unbrotherly divisions. Bigotry and partizanship are dividing 
those who should never have been sundered. And how 
much useful and needed power is now withholden, because its 
possessors are at present unwilling to bestow it, accompanied, 
as it would be, with an exposure of their personal inferiority. 
The talent being but one, they deem it but Christian modesty 
to enwrap and inter it. A faith which shall purge the heart 
of these base and earth-born feelings, and make the motives 
of action necessarily more powerful, as they were more sim- 
ple and pure, would evidently strengthen the aggressive 
energies of the church for her inroads upon the dominions of 
spiritual darkness. 

The force of pious example in the Christian church, as 
influencing the world, is yet but scantily developed. But 



276 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 

when there should prevail a general union amongst the disci- 
ples of our Lord, one of the most common topics of reproach, 
employed by the world, would be taken away. Affecting, 
also, as an increase of faith would do, the personal character 
of each member in the various divisions of the Christian 
church, what would be the influence of the resplendent and 
consistent holiness thus cherished, upon the families and de- 
pendents, the neighbors and friends of Christians ! And 
this influence would be felt, not merely inviting their co-op- 
eration in the missionary alms of the church, but attracting 
and awakening them to inquiry and repentance, and drawing 
them into the same bonds of tender and heavenly brother- 
hood. How much of the reasoning and zeal and energy of 
the chu r ch is now wasted, because counteracted by the luke- 
warm remissness or the undisguised scandals exhibited in 
multitudes wearing the Christian name. And when a vigor- 
ous and wholesome faith should purify our churches ; when 
the unhealthy and diseased portions should be seen sloughing 
away under the searching influence of Christian discipline, 
and the faithfulness of an evangelical ministry ; and the 
church should shine forth in the healthful beauty and symme- 
try of holiness ; what would be the boldness of her advocates, 
the power of her appeals, and the confusion of her enemies ! 
And all these would be felt immediately in the fields of mis- 
sionary labor ; the Christian mariner, the Christian merchant, 
and the Christian traveller, would strengthen by a holy ex- 
ample, in the sight of the heathen, the hands of the Christian 
missionary. 

But the most important advantage thus gained, for the 
cause of our Lord in unevangelized lands, would be the en- 
larged channel for the communication of the Divine Influ- 
ences. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. Great 
faith delights, as a weak and narrow faith dishonors and 
grieves Him. And when the thousands of Israel shall go up 
with the ardent though humble expectation of receiving an 
answer to their prayers, whilst the supplications of primitive 
faith should again ascend, who shall say that the wonders of 
the early church may not return ; and men, in the spirit and 
power of the early believers, rise up to become the heralds 
of salvation to the most distant and most brutified tribes of 
mankind ? Assuredly those who shall honor Him by a child- 
like dependence, would be honored of Him. Then, as the 
early and the latter rain descended, and when the " fountains 



TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 277 

of the great deep" of moral power now unemployed, should 
be broken up from beneath in a wrestling church, and " the 
windows of heaven " be opened from above by a favoring 
God ; how rapidly would the waters of salvation rise and 
swell and diffuse themselves, till the knowledge of the Lord 
should cover the earth, 

" And like a sea of glory, 
It spread from pole to pole." 

III. From this review of the possible and legitimate fruits 
of Christian faith, let us turn to its actual results in our midst, 
that we may learn the deficiencies in our faith which 

RETARD THE TRIUMPHS OF CHRISTIAN TRUTH OVER ITS 
ANTAGONIST ERRORS. 

We are accustomed to look abroad to the mass of evil with 
which the Christian missionary must contend in heathen 
lands, and to suppose that here are the chief obstacles to his 
success. The language of the text and the previous consid- 
erations brought before you, would lead to the conclusion 
that this is not the truth. Not in the gorgeous temples, and 
the costly images, and all the imposing pageantry of idolatry, 
by which he is environed ; not in the wiles and violence of 
an organized and interested priesthood ; not in the deep hold 
which a false religion has taken upon the arts, and customs, 
and literature, and every institution, political and social, of 
the nation ; not in any of these, nor in all of them united, is 
the most formidable resistance to his labors to be found. The 
stress of battle is in a remoter and unobserved portion of the 
field. His foes and his hinderances are rather to be sought 
in the land he has left, and in the very bosom of the church 
which has commissioned and dispatched him. It is because 
their faith is not increased adequately to sustain him, that his 
heart languishes, and his soul is faint within him ; and while 
he calls upon the obstinate and besotted pagan before him to 
repent of his unbelief, he sends back over the intervening 
ocean, to the churches of his native land, an appeal not less 
earnest and yet more touching, that they too repent of the 
poverty and pettiness of their faith, and that they enlarge 
him in his labors according to the apostolic rule, and upon 
the primitive model. 

The existence of such deficiencies in our faith is painfully 
evident, in the inadequacy of the views which that faith min- 
isters, of the external fruits which it produces, and of the^ 



273 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 

internal spirit which it breathes ; or in its influence upon 
the intellect, the conduct and the affections. 

1. The views with which their faith furnishes the majority 
of those attached to our churches, are then singularly inade- 
quate with regard to the miseries of the world. Of the fear- 
ful condition of the vast mass of our race, the hundreds of 
millions ignorant or neglectful of the Gospel, we think little 
and inquire still less, Of temporal suffering — of the anguish 
which ignorance, vice, and unrestrained passion are working 
merely for this life, how immense is the amount ; for gross 
darkness covers the nations, and the dark places of the earth 
are necessarily and ever full of the habitations of cruelty. 
How fatal is the influence upon human happiness, even for 
the few days of our earthly career, of vice, not merely legal- 
ized, but sanctified and deified in the national idols, as we 
find it under every form of paganism. But what is even this, 
compared to the hopeless and unending woe into which death 
shall hurl the tribes of heathenism. And yet those, who thus, 
whilst groaning under present misery, work out fiercer suf- 
ferings for eternity, are our brethren, like us fallen and vicious, 
but like us, immortal and accountable. Of this fearful wretch- 
edness our perception is indistinct and transient. We have 
no deep and abiding conviction of the evil of sin, and the 
necessary misery of its captives. 

There is equal deficiency in our views of the 'promises of 
Scripture. How large a portion of prophecy is given to the 
glories of the Messiah's kingdom ! They occupy a promi- 
nent room and large space in the brief form of supplication 
given by our Saviour to his disciples. Redolent as these 
promises are of the most delightful hopes, how seldom do we 
remember, and how faintly plead them ; though the kingdoms 
of the world shall become the kingdoms of God's Son, the 
Gentiles shall be his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of 
the earth are his assured possession. 

Come then, and, added to thy many crowns, 
Receive yet one, the crown of all the earth, 
Thou who alone art worthy ! — 
The very spirit of the world is tired 
Of its own taunting question, asked so long, 
"Where is the promise of your Lord's approach 7" 
Come then, and, added to thy many crowns, 
Receive yet one, as radiant as the rest, 
Due to thy last and most effectual work, 
Thy word fulfilled, the conquest of a world. 



TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 279 

Nor are our views more just and complete as to our own 
obligations and vows. Although our entrance upon the 
course of Christian profession was by devoting ourselves to 
the service of the Lord, and having given ourselves to Him, 
we gave ourselves into the church by His will ; has not the 
dedication been forgotten, or practically revoked by too many 
of our number? The lights of the earth — we are shedding 
around but a dim, flickering, and uncertain lustre. The salt 
of the world — who has perceived in us the savor of Christian 
vitality 1 

But especially do our views assume the appearance of 
meagre insufficiency, in the estimate they afford of the pecu- 
liar opportunities of the age for Christian usefulness. "Ye 
hypocrites," exclaimed our Lord, iS can ye not discern the 
signs of the times?" Are the larger number of Christians 
at all awake to the fact, that the signs of our times call upon 
the believers of the nineteenth century for unprecedented 
exertions? The advance of popular freedom and general 
education, the unrestrained commercial intercourse of nations, 
the wide-spread peace now enjoyed, the improved speed and 
lessened expense of travelling, the newly-developed powers 
of the press, the powers each day more apparent of voluntary 
associations, the extensive and daily extending use of the 
language we have inherited from England,* and which is now 
becoming intelligible in the chief maritime ports of the world 
• — all require at the hands of American Christians no ordinary 
exertions. The daily enlargements of the mission field, and 
the success of truth's first onset upon the powers of darkness, 
are summoning us most impressively to action. The institu- 
tions of Hindooism, of such vaunted antiquity, and rooted in 
the veneration of ages, seem already tottering to their over- 
throw, ere the generation is gone from the earth that first 
sapped their base. The barrier which long closed the vast 
empire of China is now found to be but the brittle seal of an 
imperial edict, unsustained by the national feelings. The 
word of God, as recently translated and published in lan- 
guages never before taught the name of Jehovah, is calling 
for the living preacher to scatter and to interpret it. Amid 
ail these omens of good and incentives to diligence, are we 
found awake to the fact, or conscious of the majesty and 
splendor of the scenes now opening ? On the contrary, is 
not the church protracting her slumbers, while the whole 
heaven above her is reddening with the dawn of that day, 



280 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 

which shall usher in her restoration and the redemption of 
all the earth ? 

But the most afflictive defect in our views, is the slight and 
irreverent estimate we form of our Divine Ally. The King 
of kings is our intercessor, the Omniscient Spirit is our 
teacher ; and we are invited to counsel with Divine Wisdom, 
and to stay ourselves on the arm of Creative Power. Yet 
how do we narrow down the magnificence of the Divine 
promises, and compress the hopes, large and grand, offered 
by the gospel, into some petty and pitiful request, that, as we 
imagine, bespeaks Christian humility, but in truth displays 
contemptuous unbelief. What ! when God is for us, is it not 
most guilty to hesitate and linger in minor and facile enter- 
prises ? What would have been thought of him whose mem- 
ory we are wont to hail as the Father of his country, if, when 
joined by the fleets and army of our foreign ally, he had 
gathered the combined host to the siege of some petty bar- 
rack, garrisoned by a few disbanded invalids ? The great- 
ness of the God we serve, demands on our part a large and 
manly, a far-sighted and far-reaching faith. 

2. The same odious discrepancy between its privileges and 
doings, its powers and its results, is seen in the external 
fruits of our faith,, or its influence upon the conduct. In the 
prayers of the church, as offered in her solemn assemblies, 
is there the due and earnest remembrance of the missionary 
laborer, who has, like Jonathan and his armor-bearer, clam- 
bered up into the high places of heathenism, and finds him- 
self alone in the very midst of the enemy? In the Monthly 
Concert, that touching union which brings the Christians of 
every hue, and language, and kindred, into one assembly, and 
blends their hearts in the utterance of one petition, is the 
meeting maintained with that general and devout attendance 
demanded by the beauty of its conception and the grandeur 
of its object? Of the alms of the church — how pitiful the 
amount compared with the free and glad sacrifices made on 
the altars of dissipation and intemperance, in games of chance, 
in fashionable equipages, furniture, and dress, in the support 
of the theatre, the race-course, and the lottery, in the ex- 
travagance of our tables, and the sumptuousness of our 
homes. Of that which is given, how much is the niggardly 
parings of a plentiful income. We have begun by devoting 
to God the choicest of the herd and the firstlings of the flock ; 
and have finished by laying on His altars but the offals of the 



TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 281 

victim. In our labors and our sacrifices for the cause of God, 
how rarely is found the noble disinterestedness, or the hum- 
ble and retiring generosity that distinguished the faith of the 
primitive times. But, above all, is there not need of a wide 
and deep renovation throughout the mass of our churches, 
ere the standard of personal holiness can be deemed at all 
comparable with that which sprung from faith, as apostles 
preached it, and as its first confessors received it ? 

3. The internal spirit which it breathes, was spoken of as 
betraying a deficiency in the faith of modern belie /ers. If 
love to man be the second great commandment of the Scrip- 
tures, is it sufficiently awakened within us, and in proportion 
to the dignity which revelation has thus assigned it ? But in 
love to God, in anxiety for continued communion with Him, 
and deepening conformity to His image, in desire for the 
honor of His name, are we not verily guilty of a fearful de- 
ficiency, and needs not our faith immediate renovation and 
increase ? Have we that intense fear and abhorrence of sin 
which a lively faith ever displays ? The confidence of the 
faitaful anciently inspired them with a holy and dauntless 
courage, as they faced and rebuked the world. Is ours thus 
operative ? Theirs was a humility, which, springing from 
conscious weakness, clung the more closely to God, and amid 
the largest success, resigned to Him the undivided glory ; is 
our faith thus lowly in its spirit and tendency ? The voice 
of inspiration has said, "If any man have not the spirit of 
Christ, he is none of his." Is the faith, in the possession of 
which we exult, thus attended and verified ? Have we been 
fashioned into his likeness and imbibed his temper? Is ours 
the life of cross-bearing and watchfulness and prayerfulness ? 
if not, is it a life of discipleship to Christ? — is it the race of 
faith, swift, direct, and onward ? and shall it win at last the 
crown of the triumphant believer ? 

Church of the living God, is there not utterly a fault 
amongst us in this matter? And until our faith increase, can 
we hope that, according to the rule of Paul's apostolic labors, 
the destitute Gentiles should be evangelized? Is not an en- 
largement now demanded and now due in the labors, prayers, 
and alms that go to sustain the cause of Christian missions \ 
and what but the renovation of faith shall work that enlarge- 
ment? Let us not contrast our sacrifices and zeal merely 
with those of the Master whose name we bear, and whom we 
have avouched as our Great Exemplar : let us but measure 

37 



282 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY. 

our endeavors, in their number, and in the prudence, liberal- 
ity, and perseverance that mark them, with the efforts and 
spirit of the men of this world, who are without hope and 
without God. Yielding up the comforts of home and the 
society of friends, forswearing ease, periling character, lav- 
ishing life, and venturing even upon eternal ruin, as they do, 
the walks of this world's business and of this world's pleas- 
ures are strewed with the voluntary and costly sacrifices of 
time, property, comfort, life, and salvation. But we, with a 
soul to save, a heaven to lose or win, a Christ to publish, 
and a God to serve — how shamefully calm are we found, and 
timid and half-hearted ! And this, while the world is rushing 
into ruin, and bearing on its swollen and rapid stream our 
friends, our neighbors, and our children ; — while the earth 
which God has promised to bless, (and that by human instru- 
mentality,) lies as yet, prostrate and groaning, under the curse 
poured out through all her coasts. The time is coming, and 
prophecy has foretold it, when in every land there shall be 
offered to God a pure offering — when, from the closet and 
the sanctuary, from the hill-top, the field, and the forest-side, 
where the children of God shall, like Isaac, walk forth at 
eventide to meditate, the voice of pious supplication shall 
ascend in one continuous stream ; until our globe, as it rolls 
along its orbit, shall seem but a censer revolving in the hand 
of the Great High Priest, and pouring out at every aperture 
a cloud, dense and rich, of incense, fragrant and grateful to 
God. But, as yet, the ascending cloud is one of far other 
kind. Its skirts are dark with sullen gloom, and its bosom 
is charged with indignation and vengeance. Wailing and 
blasphemy, oppression and outrage, pollution and falsehood, 
have swollen and blackened it ; and with it, a cry goes up, 
like that from the cities of the plain, piercing the ear of God. 
Day unto day uttereth speech of human wretchedness, and 
night unto night showeth knowledge of human wickedness. 
What has our faith, my brethren, done for its relief? What 
will be the fruits of our belief in the alms and the prayers 
now demanded ; what its share in the services of this assem- 
bly ? Shall we not exclaim, reviewing the greatness of the 
task, on the one hand, and, on the other, the greatness of 
the guilt which has neglected it, as did the apostles, whilst 
their Lord was enjoining a duty alike necessary and difficult, 
"Lord, increase our faith?" 



THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL 
ACCURSED. 

"i marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you 
into the grace of christ unto another grospel : which is not ano- 
ther ; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the 
Gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach 
any OTrfER Gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto 

YOU, LET HIM BE ACCURSED. As WE SAID BEFORE, SO SAY I NOW AGAIN, If 
ANY MAN PREACH ANY OTHER GOSPEL UNTO YOU THAN THAT YE HAVE RE- 
CEIVE^, let him be accursed." — Galatians i. 6-9. 

How full are these words of force and solemnity. Let us 
fix the mind on them until we feel their significancy. Is it a 
profane blasphemer, who opens his mouth only to pour forth 
execrations, who has " clothed himself with cursing as with a 
garment," and whose malignant feelings towards his fellow- 
man assume the awful form of an appeal to heaven ? No ; 
it is one who delighted rather in blessing ; and who, cruelly 
as he was hated by his own nation, requited their enmity 
only with the most earnest wishes for their salvation, though 
he were himself accursed to obtain it. Is it the hot haste of 
a good man speaking unadvisedly, and rather according to 
the infirmity of the man than the sobriety of the saint ? The 
very form into which it is cast, and the calm, firm repetition 
of its tremendous denunciations, stamps it as the language of 
deliberation. Far from being an outburst of human passion, 
the language is that of one full of the Holy Ghost, of one 
selected and sent forth by Christ to be an authoritative teach- 
er of the churches — an inspired apostle. They are not the 
words of human infirmity, but the utterances of a holy God 
and a true — his unerring and " lively oracles." May, then, 
that Spirit which spoke in Paul hearken in us. The truth 
here taught us, if awful, is yet a salutary and timely one. 
We learn, 



284 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 

I. That it is possible to ascertain what the true Gospel is ; 

II. That the Gospel is unchangeable ; 

III. And that they who pervert it are accursed. 

1. It is possible to acquire certainty as to the true nature 
of the Gospel. Paul's language throughout the epistle 
implies this. It would have been most unreasonable and 
most cruel thus to denounce those whose doubts as to the 
real purport of the Gospel were unavoidable and excusable. 
He makes no exceptions for ignorance, and prejudice, and 
heedlessness. He needed to make none. He had creden- 
tials, such as none of their false teachers brought, that Christ 
had sent him to preach the Gospel. Miracles, prophecies, 
and the moral results of his preaching, proclaimed him one 
commissioned of God. As to the doctrines he had taught, 
they could be left in no doubt. He assumes that the dis- 
tinction between his own gospel and that of the rival teach- 
ers was palpable on the most cursory examination ; and that 
his rudest hearers were competent to perceive the differ- 
ence between the opposing doctrines, and were bound to 
make the requisite discrimination. He had spoken clearly 
and without reserve ; consistently and without variation. 
He had in Galatia, as every where else, taught that men 
were sinners and could not be saved by their own good 
deeds; but that Christ " gave himself for us,"* and hav- 
ing died as the sacrifice, arose as the High Priest ; and that, 
repenting and believing, men might be justified freely in his 
righteousness, and accepted through his mediation. He had 
taught that by nature all inherited and deserved the wrath 
of God ; but that through Jesus the Holy Spirit was given, 
producing a change of heart. He had taught that the fruit 
of the Spirit thus given would be necessarily holiness of life 
in each true convert. Christ, the crucified Redeemer, the 
Holy Spirit, the great renewer and enlightener of the world, 
were the theme of his familiar converse, his ministrations 
and his writings. There was no want of certainty, then, as 
to what he had taught, and what they should believe. 

2. But we find men, often excusing themselves for having 
spent a whole lifetime in a state of spiritual irresolution, or 
what is rather indifference to all religion, sheltering them- 
selves under the plea, that amid contending systems and 
warring pulpits they cannot ascertain what the Gospel really 

* Gulatians i. 4. 



THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 285 

is. Some, calling themselves Christian teachers, assure 
them that there is no hell, but that death is to every man 
the gate of heaven. Others contend that Christ had no in- 
herent deity, and made no propitiatory sacrifice. He was 
but a wise and good teacher, and if men are saved, it is not 
by his atonement or by any other substitute sacrificed in 
their stead. Others, again, teach that Christ did indeed die 
for our salvation, but that it is our own meritorious conduct 
and character that entitle us to his salvation, or in other 
words, we are saved by our own righteousness. Amid the 
teachers who thus stand contending with each other, and 
contradicting the testimony of the great body of Christians 
in all ages, these irresolute men profess to be at a loss what 
sentiments to receive. And sometimes they wish that they 
had lived in the primitive ages of the church, and could have 
heard the Gospel from the lips of the apostles themselves. 

Let such remember, then, that in the apostles' times they 
would have been subjected to the same perplexity of which 
they complain in our own. Let them remember, also, that 
they would then have found relief only from the same sources 
to which they are directed now. If they are distressed by 
the many and contradictory teachings of human guides, the 
Galatians were exposed to the same trial. While the apos- 
tles yet lived, the churches they had themselves planted and 
instructed were visited by those who taught another Gospel. 
Paul had taught a righteousness by faith in Christ that mag- 
nified the cross. These false teachers taught a righteousness 
that was of the law, making void the cross of Christ. In 
what way were the Galatians to know the truth ? The apos- 
tle was not always with them. They had his teachings 
treasured in their memory, and as recorded in his epistles. 
They had the teachings of other apostles, and of uninspired 
teachers known to accord in their doctrines with the inspired 
and authoritative guides of the church. And they had the 
Scriptures of the Old Testament. But above all these they 
had unimpeded access to God, and the Spirit of God was 
their counsellor. Under what process of teaching, and in 
what type of doctrine had they received this Spirit ? In 
that teaching and doctrine let them persevere. That Spirit, 
sought in prayer, would explain the Scriptures, and guide 
rightly and safely. If we are in the providence of God 
brought into similar conflicts from the opposing dogmas of 
men, we have the same resort in the Scriptures, and the 



286 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 

like refuge in the Spirit of God. The volume gives no 
uncertain response ; the Holy Ghost is no tardy or inefficient 
instructor. 

3. Now is it not most irrational — we appeal, my fellow- 
immortals, to your own consciences — is it not most irration- 
al to stun and weary your ears with the din of human 
controversies, while you make no appeal to the original 
authorities ? Are you sincerely in quest of truth ? Had 
you been told of an estate bequeathed you by some distant 
friend, and one informant spoke of it as small in amount, 
and another described it as being of great value, and you 
found yourself involved in a whirlwind of contradictory state- 
ments ; would you compare and collate the rumors on every 
side, and form your opinion from them, or appeal at once to 
the written will and the surrogate ? If you were told that 
your home was in flames, would you go around questioning 
those who had left the scene as to its origin, and extent, and 
ravages ; or would you not rather cast aside all other en- 
gagements, and rush to the rescue of your property and 
your family, to see with your own eyes, and toil with your 
own hands ? And are salvation, and the soul, and heaven 
worth so little that they do not require the like personal 
investigation, the like decisive appeal to the ultimate authori- 
ties? 

Prophets and apostles, and the Lord of apostles and the 
Master of the prophets, hold in this case but one language. 
They refer you to the record. " To the law and to the tes- 
timony," cried the prophets ; if your teachings — if your 
teachers speak not according to these, it is because " there 
is no truth in them." " Search the Scriptures," is the com- 
mand of Christ ; " which are able to make you wise unto 
salvation," respond the glorious company of the apostles. 
Do you complain of dulness and weakness of mind? they 
reply, " If any man lack wisdom let him ask of God, who 
giveth liberally, and who upbraideth not ;" and a louder and 
sweeter voice than theirs is heard, continuing the strain — • 
" The Spirit shall lead unto all truth ;" — while the prophets, 
catching and re-echoing the invitation thus addressed to weak 
and erring man, exclaim, " The wayfaring man, though a 
fool, shall not err therein." 

Until the Scriptures, therefore, are abrogated, and until 
the Spirit of God has abdicated his office as teacher of the 
church, you cannot be at a loss, if disposed, in a candid and 



TILE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 287 

docile spirit, to learn what are the real doctrines of the 
Gospel. If a man will not ask that Spirit, indeed, he may 
have the ablest of human teachings, and bring to the book an 
intellect of angelic power, and yet the result be but error 
and darkness. But if he will come in the name of Jesus, 
imploring the Spirit, idiocy itself shall not prevent his learn- 
ing the way of salvation. If he refuses thus to come, and 
will not study the book of God in God's own appointed way, 
he is not entitled to complain of uncertainty as to his reli- 
gious opinions, much less to dogmatize in his scepticism. 
Let us, then, in this matter be honest to our own souls, for 
death is on his way : a judge is even now at the door, who 
will not stoop to answer our cavillings ; and wretched theit 
will be the fate of that man, who, with the open Bible before 
him, and the hovering dove of the Spirit above him, has 
neglected the one and repelled the other. 

Make but the experiment in the temper of a little child, 
and a certainty, sure and unshaken as the everlasting hills, 
shall possess your souls, while truth darts in upon the dark- 
ened mind, and in the light of God you see light — the 
uncreated, undeclining glory of God, in the face of his Son. 
Then shall you know that Gospel which Paul preached, and 
whose promises he is now inheriting. 

II. But again, the religion of which we may thus obtain a 
certain knowledge is unchangeable in its character. We 
hear men, sometimes, in forgetfulness of this character of 
Christianity, exclaiming, " Shall science and art go on, from 
day to day altering their forms and extending their bounda- 
ries, and religion alone receive and admit no improvement?" 
If they mean that the language of the Bible may be better 
understood, and that new researches of the antiquarian and 
traveller, and new fulfilments of prophecy, may throw new 
and yet increasing light on the pages of the sacred volume — 
if they mean only, that in days of higher devotedness, such 
as the church is yet to see, there may be a more thorough 
mastery of the doctrines and a more resplendent exhibition 
of the morals of Christianity — this no Christian denies ; but 
that the facts of Christianity can be modified, its morality be 
amended, or its doctrines altered, is impossible. Those who 
suppose it, forget that the Gospel is not a discovery but a 
revelation. 

2. The Gospel is not a discovery but a revelation. By a 
discovery we mean what man's intellect has found out by 



288 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 

its own efforts : by a revelation, what God's intellect has 
communicated to man's intellect, and what, if not thus aided, 
man could not have discovered for himself. The one is the 
fruit of man's labor, the other the gift of God's grace. Now, 
what man's intellect has discovered, man's intellect may 
investigate more thoroughly and understand more perfectly. 
But what man has learned only from God's disclosures, he 
can of course understand no further than he finds it on the 
face of those disclosures. He cannot go up to the original 
truths themselves upon which God drew, and thus improve 
on the Divine communications. Some of the disclosures 
thus made are, from the very necessity of our nature, or 
from a wise regard to our present interests and duties, im- 
perfect revelations, leaving portions of the subject shrouded 
in darkness. These imperfect revelations are called myste- 
ries. With the limits set by the Divine mind to his revela- 
tions, our investigations must terminate : the attempt to pass 
beyond these is not only temerity, it is folly and ruin. The 
adventurer dashes himself to his own destruction against the 
impassable barriers of the human intellect. 

When Columbus found our continent, it was a discovery. 
Where one man had gone, other men might follow, and 
inquire more fully, and learn more correctly than did the 
original discoverer, and thus our knowledge of America may 
be destined to receive daily improvements. But when Paul 
was rapt into the third heaven, and saw and heard what it 
was unlawful to utter, it was a revelation. No mortal foot 
could follow him, to pursue and improve his account. Now, 
had it been permitted Paul to describe in writing the celes- 
tial glories thus unveiled to him, those who wished to un- 
derstand the nature of that upper world would have but one 
course left for them to pursue. They must investigate 
Paul's character for veracity, and the evidences he adduced 
that the Most High had conferred on him so transcendant a 
favor as to be permitted to become a visitant there. When 
they had settled these questions, all that their philosophy 
could do would be but to explain Paul's language as they 
found it in his descriptions. They could not hope for fur- 
ther knowledge of the world described, unless God should 
choose to make a fresh revelation to another Paul. No tel- 
escope could read what his vision had left unread — no crea- 
ted wing could bear the student up the pathless skies to 
investigate what Paul had left untold : no stretch of human 






THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 289 

sagacity could add to the record as the apostle left it. With 
the first discoverer of our western world it was different : 
his account sent back to Europe could be continually amend- 
ed and enlarged ; and the school-boy of our times may know 
more of the new world than did the sagacious navigator who 
first conjectured and then established its existence. 

III. Now, the Gospel is strictly a revelation. It tells us 
of a world which we can enter for ourselves only by dying : 
it tells us of the nature and will of our God what none but 
he could tell, and of which we can know only as much as 
he has chosen to tell. As the human intellect did not dis- 
cover the Gospel, so no advancement of the human intellect 
can amend or alter it : but we have heard and read of men 
who have dared to say, " Christ came to set up a dispensa- 
tion ; it is now past ; it has done service in its day, but its 
day is now gone by. The Gospel needed by our refined 
and scientific times must be a new dispensation." We 
shudder at the profanity, of the spirit that can vent itself in 
language of such impious arrogance ; for no man may claim 
to come with a new dispensation, unless he comes heralded 
by such prophecies as ushered Christ's way, and attended 
by such miracles as marked the whole course of the Re- 
deemer. We say to the sophists and dreamers who talk 
thus madly of the perfectibility of human nature, and its 
need of a new and amended Gospel, " Produce your wit- 
nesses ; let the winds obey your bidding, and the waves 
become the fixed and stable pavement of your feet ; give 
eyes to the blind, and call the dead from their tombs ; speak, 
as Christ spoke, the words of Divine wisdom ; and read, as 
did he, the secrets of the heart. Die as Christ died, with 
the earth heaving beneath, and the heavens darkened above, 
to attest their sympathy with, and their subjection to, the 
mighty sufferer. And having done this, you have but half 
done your mission : show the niche in ancient prophecy 
reserved for your coming. When Jesus appeared, he came 
in the train of a long procession of prophets, who had before 
witnessed of his coming, and carried the line of their testi- 
mony, in unbroken continuity, from Eden up to Calvary. 
He did, indeed, supersede a former dispensation ; but that 
very dispensation had predicted its own departure and de- 
scribed Christ's advent. Does the present dispensation, that 
of Christ's Gospel, speak of itself as being thus transient 
and temporary ? No, it claims to endure till yon sun shall 

38 



290 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 

have forsaken his station : the Gospel is an everlasting Gos- 
pel. Does Moses or does Christ foretell your new Gospel ? 
The Bible has else no room for it. Yes, they do foretell it ; 
but it is in the language of Enoch ; it is the Gospel which 
the seventh from Adam foretold — the Gospel s of hard 
speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against the 
Lord,' and of which the Lord 'when he cometh with ten 
thousand of his saints,' shall 'convince the ungodly' "* 
Mad were the builders of Babel, when they would raise the 
tower, whose foot was on the earth, up to the heavens ; but 
they who would, by human discoveries, build up a new and 
better Gospel, are the builders yet more insane of a Babel 
yet more impious. 

IV. But it will be urged that there have been men cf very 
considerable austerity of morals, and of high pretensions to 
wisdom, who have taught a gospel very different from Paul's. 
"Were it not uncharitable to condemn them ? We will not 
undertake, for ourselves, to answer this question. To their 
own Master they stand or fall ; but if their Master have 
spoken, in his own oracles, in reply to this question, we 
must not suppress or condemn the response that has been 
given. By his Spirit, then, in his servant Paul, he has 
replied, and his language is, " But though we, or an 

ANGEL FROM HEAVEN, PREACH ANY OTHER GOSPEL UNTO 
YOU THAN THAT WHICH WE HAVE PREACHED UNTO YOU, 

let him be accursed." We are taught in the Scriptures, 
by men's moral fruits, to judge whether they are true disci- 
ples of the true doctrine ; but we are not allowed, merely 
by their fruits, to judge of their doctrine itself. We must 
bring this to the test of the Scriptures as well ; and, if re- 
jected by this test, whatever the comparative excellence of 
deportment in the teachers, they and their doctrine are dis- 
allowed. The apostle puts the case, in favor of a false 
teacher, into the most authoritative form, surrounding him 
with the highest splendor of moral character and the most 
plausible show of a heavenly mission. He imagines his 
own appearance as the promulgator of a new Gospel. 
Should the convert whom Christ's glory smote down on the 
highway to Damascus — he who had been in labors more 
abundant, and in deaths oft, whose were miraculous tongues 
and miraculous works — should he bring to the Galatian 

* Jude 14, 15. 






THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 291 

"church " another gospel," they were to turn from it and 
from its teacher without hesitation. He proceeds further : 
as if to put the decision into the strongest possible form, he 
imagines a teacher, possessing not merely the imperfect 
sanctity of erring man, but one invested with the holiness 
of an angel from heaven. His words do not describe Satan 
corning up out of the pit, and disguised as an angel of light ; 
but he conceives an event yet more dazzling in its seduc- 
tions, yet more perplexing and ensnaring to the mind of the 
learner. Should an angel from heaven, one yet recent from 
those glorious courts, and with the brightness of its moral 
splendor and its " beauty of holiness" still clinging about 
him, venture to sin, and commence his fall by preaching to 
our race another gospel, let him be accursed. 

V. Paul did not think lightly of those benign and blessed 
spirits that are ministering to the heirs of salvation. They 
had often appeared to the apostles, and interposed effectually 
in their behalf. Paul knew their might and wisdom ; he 
admired and emulated their holiness, their zealous obedience, 
their untiring diligence ; but, in comparison with Christ and 
his truth, Paul loved not even angels. One of these beings 
had appeared to Peter, sleeping in the inner prison and 
chained between two soldiers, and rousing him, had led him 
forth through guards and barriers to liberty. When Paul 
was himself on ship-board, sailing towards Rome, an angel 
of God appeared to him, promising him the preservation of 
his own life and the lives of all his companions ; and the 
promise was kept : but had Peter's deliverer, on their way 
after passing through " the iron gate that led into the city," 
commanded him to preach another gospel than Christ's, 
Peter would have rebuked his deliverer, and used to the 
tempter the rebuke he had once received himself from his 
Master, "Get thee behind me, Satan." Had the minister- 
ing Spirit who cheered Paul on his voyage stayed to preach 
to Paul's fellow-voyagers another gospel, Paul would have 
denounced the new system as a doctrine of devils : for no 
angel appearing from heaven could bring for his revelation 
the force of evidence we have for Christ's revelation, in its 
countless miracles, its accomplished prophecies, and the 
moral renovations wrought by its influence. And no angel 
has been promised those full influences of the Holy Spirit 
that were assured to the apostles for the benefit of the church. 
Were it possible, then, for one of these holy beings to fall 



292 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 

away and become a preacher of heresy, great as might have 
been his splendor and wisdom, and his former holiness, Paul, 
the sinner — Paul, the forgiven persecutor, would have with- 
stood and cursed him. The apostle was but a frail man ; 
his body, like ours, a tabernacle of clay, crushed before the 
moth ; yet, in all his weakness, had he met an angel of the 
highest rank in heaven, one of those " that excel in strength," 
returning from a mission like that to Sennacherib's camp, 
his right hand yet red with the blood of a hundred thousand 
warriors, and had that angel sought to turn the apostle from 
the truth as it was in Jesus, Paul would not have feared to 
denounce him in the name of their common Lord, and dust 
and ashes would have confounded the archangel. 

What cause have we for gratitude that angels have not 
endeavored thus to subvert our faith. They have, on the 
contrary, given their constant attestation and subjection to 
Christ. They with songs announced his birth to the shep- 
herds of Bethlehem. They ministered to him in the wilder- 
ness of temptation, and in the sorer agony of Gethsemane. 
Had he but summoned them, twelve legions had flown to his 
side ; they guarded his tomb, and when it was visited by the 
weeping disciples, they testified his resurrection. When he 
ascended on high, they attended him ; and when he shall 
return to judgment, they will troop around him. Mean- 
while the mighty angel seen by John flying through heaven, 
was not seen denying, but publishing the everlasting Gospel; 
and such is their attachment to our Lord, that every sinner 
believing in him has angels to rejoice in his conversion, and 
angels to minister to his onward course, to guard his depart- 
ing spirit and to reclaim his deserted clay from the sepulchre. 
Their testimony, then, is ever for Christ : they enforce the 
witness of apostles, and by all their demeanor they bid man 
do what they have themselves done at the bidding of the 
Father — worship the Son ; for, " when he bringeth in the 
first-begotten into the world, he saith, Let all the angels of 
God worship him."* Rejecting that adoration when prof- 
fered to themselves, they cheerfully yield it to the Redeemer. 
He, then, that substitutes another Gospel for that of Paul, 
cannot plead angelic patronage or instruction. They adore 
where he blasphemes. 

If true at all, then the Gospel is unmingled and immutable 

* Heb. i. 6. 



THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 293 

truth : no events can occur, no evidence be adduced, author- 
izing us to modify that system which was given of God, and 
which God guards, and that, like its Divine author, claims a 
perfection that admits neither amendment nor decay, the 
one unchangeable Gospel " which is not another." 

VI. Those perverting the Gospel are accursed, not be- 
cause fallible man has willed it, but God the Holy Ghost has 
pronounced the curse ; and who may annuL or dispute it? 
The fearful doom is not unmerited. Whatever the external 
recommendations of any such system, or of its advocates, 
did their show of excellence equal that of an angel, as yet 
but in the first hour of his fall, they inherit a fearful curse, 
because of the crime they commit and the mischief they 
occasion. 

I. Of the greatness of the crime we form but inadequate 
conceptions, from the blindness produced by our share in the 
guilt of our race, and also from the faint and remote views 
we have of God. Yet what arrogance is it, evidently, to 
alter the teachings of the Unerring and the Omniscient, the 
Holy One of Israel — what the tearfulness of the presumption, 
that would correct infinite wisdom and contradict the God 
of truth ! There is something most daring and portentous in 
the ingratitude of the creature that would dictate and pre- 
scribe to the Creator who has made him, and the unwearied 
Benefactor whose sleepless vigilance protects him from 
destruction, and whose untiring bounty is daily supplying 
him. Ajid how aggravated the sin of rejecting, on any pre- 
text, the plans and the gifts of that Redeemer who has died 
for us, and of grieving that Spirit which would have recon- 
ciled and sanctified us. And what language can describe the 
aggravated cruelty of thus counterworking God's designs of 
mercy in the Gospel ? It is a revelation of grace, in which 
wrath was to be appeased, that mercy might have its free 
course over the miseries of a groaning world. They who 
set aside this Gospel, remove or clog the channel of God's 
mercy, that his vengeance may have its original scope, and 
roll its consuming deluge over a world of sin. The man 
who would cut off the supplies of food from his famished 
fellow-creatures in a besieged town — the wretch who should 
in wantonness destroy all the remedies provided for a hos- 
pital in which crowds were tossing in agony — agony that, 
unrelieved, must issue in death, but which these remedies 
could not only relieve but remove — such a destroyer, such a 



294 THE PREAJI.ING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 

traitor were surely not as cruel as the man who sets aside 
the true Gospel. For the religion of Christ is the food of 
the soul and the bread of heaven ; and the atonement of 
Christ, as Paul preached it, is the one remedy for the 
wretchedness and sin of our race, and apart from it there is 
no salvation for the soul to all eternity. 

2. The greatness of the mischief is necessarily incalcula- 
ble. For all earthly powers must fail to span and to gauge 
that eternity, into which death ushers us, and for which the 
Gospel is to prepare us. To pervert that Gospel is to aid 
Satan in thrusting down our race to misery unremitting and 
unimaginable. What is a conflagration that lay* a city in 
ashes, or a plague sweeping over the breadth of the land — 
what is loss of freedom, or reputation, or life, compared 
with the loss of the soul 1 And he who sets aside the Gos- 
pel ruins not one soul but many. " Their word will eat as 
doth a canker." Error is contagious. The victim of delu- 
sion will seek to quiet his conscience, and increase the 
influence of his system, by swelling the number of proselytes 
to his party from every side. Who can calculate the blind, 
led by the blind, that have already entered the pit, and are 
now even rejoicing on their way thither? To have any 
share in producing such mischief, is to aid in feeding the 
worm that never dies, and to heap fuel on the flame that is 
never quenched. May the mercy of God save us from such 
sin. Better were it to beg crumbs with Lazarus, and sit 
with Job on the dunghill, than to share riches, honor and 
power here, on condition of preaching another gospel, and 
prophesying smooth things, and crying "peace, peace," 
while God's own voice proclaims, " There is no peace to 
the wicked." 

With these views, then, of the character of the Gospel, 
let us ask ourselves, as in the sight of God, Have we the 
Gospel that Paul preached, or do we receive another? If we 
receive that which he preached, do we obey it ? If it be our 
hope and guide, let us hold it fast with an unwavering confi- 
dence, and defend it by a fearless profession, though man 
cavil at, or an angel contradict its testimonies ; content with 
the assurance that what the Scriptures teach and the Spirit 
seals shall stand, though the elements melt with fervent heat, 
and the heavens pass away as a scroll when it is rolled to- 
gether. 

1. It is evidently the interest and duty of every hearer of 






THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 295 

the Gospel to ascertain that he is receiving that system of 
truth which the apostles taught. The word of God allows 
not, nor will his bar acquit those who have trusted indo- 
lently in the numbers attached to their sect, or in the wisdom 
or piety of their teachers, while careless a» to their own 
personal experience of religion, and neglect the earnest 
study of those Scriptures that are to try every doctrine and 
judge every spirit. In Paul's time the Gospel had its 
opposers among the Jews who sought after signs, and among 
the Greeks who looked for wisdom. And men now reject 
or modify the Gospel for the same causes. Should modern 
systems, therefore, demand our faith and claim to supplant 
the Gospel of Paul, either because of the signs and wonders 
that attest them and the new revelations they boast to have 
received, on the one hand, or because of the superior wis- 
dom, refinement and philosophy of those who defend them, 
on the other hand ; we do well to remember that we receive 
such systems at our peril. And the wo that smites the 
teachers of these errors will not spare their followers. 

2. Errors in religion are neither rare nor harmless. If 
even in apostolic times there were not wanting heresies of 
the most fatal character, we have no reason to expect that 
they should become less numerous or less fatal, now that the 
age of miracles is past, and the presence of inspired and 
infallible teachers is withdrawn. And if, from these varied 
forms of religious belief, some would infer the harmlessness 
of error, and teach us that every system, calling itself Chris- 
tian, has in the main the great truths necessary to piety here 
and happiness hereafter, we need but bring their theory to 
the test of the text before us. The teachers opposing Paul, 
those at least in Galatia, preached apparently the same God 
and the same judgment and eternal retribution, as did the 
apostle ; nor is there any evidence that they disputed the 
divine mission of our Saviour. But there was an entire 
difference of statement as to the way of salvation. How did 
Paul act ? Did he respect the independence of those who 
thus differed from him, and assert their essential union with 
himself in the great matters of the faith? The course that 
he pursued so resolutely himself, and so impressively urged 
upon others, was far different. Instead of dwelling on the 
opinions held in common, as furnishing a sufficient basis for 
concord, and acknowledging in the truths they yet retained 
the basis of a common Christianity, he denounced, without 



296 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 

compromise or qualification, the opposing doctrine as being 
"another gospel." For it taught error as to the fundamen- 
tal truth, the mode of a sinner's acceptance with God. 

3. There are truths in religion of such vital importance 
that departure from them must destroy the soul. The holi- 
ness that the Gospel came to foster is the effect of truth 
received in the love of it. And this truth is in its own 
nature harmonious and one. Truth cannot contradict itself: 
nor in science or art can there be two opposed and warring 
truths. So is it also in religion. The singleness of truth 
constitutes the basis of its exclusiveness. It claims for itself, 
exclusively and without rival, the faith and obedience of 
mankind ; a claim that is exclusive because it is just, and 
that could not be consistent without requiring thus the rejec- 
tion of all error. These exclusive claims are often misrep- 
resented as involving the most odious intolerance and illiber- 
ally. But in truth there is no more a possibility of the 
existence of several true religions, than there is of the exist- 
ence of more than one God. From the one Jehovah there 
can emanate but the one truth — developed, indeed, in differ- 
ent degrees at different ages, in Judaism the bud, in Chris- 
tianity the expanded flower — but essentially, and in all ages, 
the one unchanged and unchangeable religion, revealing for 
man the sinner, salvation, through an atonement and Medi- 
ator of Divine appointment. Much of error may be mingled 
with this truth in various minds ; but there are vital errors 
which the word of God has doomed as the seals of ruin in 
those who retain them. It recognizes in the church of God 
one head and one foundation, and those only are acknow- 
ledged as the heirs of life who build on this foundation, and 

"WHO HOLD THE HEAD." 






THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 

(Delivered at the time of a Collection made for the American Seamen's Friend Society.) 
" And the sea gave up the dead which were in it." — Rev. xx. 13. 

The resurrection was a favorite theme with the apostles. 
The fact of Christ's having risen, was with them the crowning 
miracle of his earthly course, and an irrefragable argument 
of his divine mission. The resurrection of all mankind by 
Christ's power, to be judged at Christ's bar, was one of the 
truths upon which the. first ministers of the gospel sought to 
turn the eyes of all their hearers. Peter preached this doc- 
trine to the scribes of Jerusalem, and Paul proclaimed it amid 
the philosophers of Athens. And what thoughts struggle 
within us, as we look forward to such a change ! These 
corruptible bodies shall stand again in the closest companion- 
ship with the souls that once inhabited them — that at death 
deserted them, but which now have resumed them. Accord- 
ing to the deeds done in the body, men are to be judged. 
The term of probation closed when the spirit quitted the 
body, and dropped it into the grave. The time of judgment 
begins when that grave is opened and that body reanimated, 
" that every one may receive the things done in his body."* 
We are prone, perhaps, to think too much of these perishable 
tabernacles of clay. But we do not, my beloved hearers, 
think enough of them, unless we think of them often and 
vividly, as bodies that are one day to rise again, endued 
with an indestructible existence, and capacitated for the end- 
less bliss of heaven, or the eternal misery of hell. 

I. This great doctrine, the resurrection of the body, seems 
yet better fitted than the kindred truth of the immortality of 
the soul, to make a powerful impression on the mind of man, 
when receiving the gospel for the first time. The heathen 
may have heard of the existence after death of the immaterial 



* 2 Cor. v. 10. 

39 



298 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 

spirit within him ; but he thinks of that principle as some- 
thing impalpable and unearthly, that he has never yet seen, 
and that is scarce the same with himself. He may have 
heard even that after death he should still have a body. He 
may have been taught, as many an idolatrous creed teaches 
its votaries, that the soul shall pass after death into other bo- 
dies of the higher or the lower orders of being. But this doc- 
trine of the transmigration of souls cannot take the same hold 
on his mind as does the scriptural truth, teaching him the 
resurrection of the existing body. The thoughts of the man, 
his fears, his hopes, and his plans, have had reference chiefly 
to the body. Bring him to look upon it as possible, that 
this — the material frame-work in which he has enjoyed or 
suffered, by which he has labored and acquired, which he 
has clothed and fed, and in which he has sinned — this body, 
which, in most of his thoughts, has been regarded as the 
whole of himself — is to live again beyond the grave, and he 
is startled. Talk to him of the inward* man of the soul, and 
he listens, as if you spoke of a stranger. But bring your 
statements home to the outward man of his body, and he 
feels that it is he himself, who is to be happy or to be wretch- 
ed in that eternity of which you tell him. Hence a living 
missionary, in his first religious instructions to the king of a 
heathen tribe in South Africa, found him indifferent and cal- 
lous to all his statements of the gospel, until this truth was 
announced. It aroused in the barbarian chief the wildest 
emotions, and excited an undisguised alarm. He had been 
a warrior, and had lifted up his spear against multitudes slain 
in battle. He asked, in amazement, if these his foes should 
all live. And the assurance that they should arise, filled him 
with perplexity and dismay, such as he could not conceal. 
He could not abide the thought. A lung slumbering con- 
science had been pierced through all its coverings. Well 
do such incidents illustrate the fact, that He who gave the 
gospel knew what was in man, and infused into the leaven of 
his own word those elements that are mightiest to work upon 
all the powers of man's soul, and to penetrate with their in- 
fluence the whole mass of human society. And in our an- 
nouncement of that gospel, we do well to adhere to the scrip- 
tural pattern given us by the Author of the gospel. Many ol 
the other doctrines of Christianity are almost insensibly 
modified, in our mode of presenting them, by the natural re- 
ligion which intimates, if it docs not establish, these or similar 



THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. m 299 

truths. But the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is 
not a doctrine of natural religion. It is purely a doctrine 
of revelation, and becomes known to us merely from the 
living oracles of Scripture. And as man's reason did not 
discover it, it is not for man's reason to alter or amend the 
doctrine according to his caprices and prejudices. 

In what glorious and terrific imagery does the Scripture 
before us array the scenes of the resurrection. In the hea- 
vens, thronged by angels in all their glory, is seen the de- 
scending throne. Upon it, in his own and his Father's glory, 
sits the Son of Man, the crucified Nazarene, now the judge 
of quick and dead. Before him the material heavens are 
rolled together as a scroll, and the elements melt with fer- 
vent heat. The creation cannot abide the dread presence 
of its Creator, " from whose face the earth and the heavens 
fled away ;" and yet they cannot escape it : " and there was 
found no place for them." His bare word had accomplished 
the miracle of creation, and now, by a kindred act of power, 
his mere glance shakes the world, and awes it into prepara- 
tion for the judgment. The old heathen talked of their 
" cloud-compelling Jove," whose eye gathered all the storms 
of the skies. But how mean is all this to the scriptural ima- 
gery of a world-compelling Christ. The trumpet sounds. 
The earth shakes with inward commotions. Its dead — its 
ancient dead — all the buried of forgotten tribes, and of ante- 
diluvian times, are coming ; more numerous than the hosts 
ever mustered by earthly captain to the battle, yet all their 
numbers infuse into them no courage in meeting their judge. 
They have no thought of resisting his power. Whatever 
the gods in whom they trusted once, they feel now the pre- 
sence, and await the fiat of the one true God, Maker and 
Judge of heaven and earth. The patriarchs, who lived when 
the world was young, and the coming generations to be born 
long after our death, who shall have lived when that world 
had grown old, shall, with us, stand before the judgment 
seat. From this tribunal there lies no appeal, and of the 
sentence now to be uttered there can be no reversal, and no 
revision. 

It will be a scene of solemn interest, not only as the meet- 
ing of man with his Redeemer and Judge, but from the 
meeting of mankind together. The scriptural accounts of 
the judgment represent it as an occasion when we shall know 
ourselves at least. From their descriptions of that day, as 



300 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 

a day of disclosures, when the secrets of all hearts shallbe 
made manifest, they seem also to imply that we shall know 
others, and be known by them. Without our consciousness 
of our own identity, there could evidently be no sense of 
guilt; and without our knowledge of the identity of our fel- 
low-sinners, it seems to us, there could be no disclosures, 
such as the Bible predicts. Man then, in that gathering, 
will not only know himself, and know his God, but he will 
know his race. And this, to the sinner, will add inconceiva- 
bly to the terrors of that assembling. The ungodly will 
meet there the righteous, who warned him in vain, and all 
whose warnings are about to be verified. Long forgotten 
emotions, and privileges undervalued and misim proved, will 
flash upon the memory, as the eye glances on the face of 
some dead friend, with whom those feelings and opportunities 
were associated. The unconverted child of the Sabbath 
schools shall face his faithful teacher ; and parents and chil- 
dren, pastors and people, all the connections which death 
had for a time sundered, shall there recognize each other. 
It will be to some a fearful meeting, as they encounter there 
for the first time those whose death they had occasioned. 
The murderer will confront his victim. Cain and Abel, who 
have been, perhaps, parted from each other since the hour 
when the fratricide fled from the scene of his crime, and the 
body of his brother lay breathless in the dust, will now meet 
again. The body which sunk beneath that murderous blow, 
dealt by a brother's hand, and the hand which inflicted that 
blow, will be there, gathered again from the indiscriminate 
dust over which the world has trodden for scores of centuries. 
But if it be fearful to meet, thus, any on whom we may have 
brought temporal death, how much more may the scene be 
dreaded, by those who have occasioned the spiritual death of 
others, as the scene of their meeting with the proselytes and 
admirers, whose souls they aided in ruining for ever. It will 
be sad for Caiaphas to meet the innocent Messiah whom he 
adjudged to death, though it was but the death of the body ; 
but it would seem almost equally sad for the Jewish High 
Priest to face there his kindred and friends, whose unbelief 
his arguments sealed, and whose impenitence his example 
served to render obdurate and final, for upon them he will 
have brought the death of the soul. The meetings of the 
resurrection will form, then, no small portion of its terrors. 
This is the truth, upon which we would chiefly insist, from 



THE SEA. GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 301 

the part of Scripture now before us. We have considered, 
generally, the resurrection of the dead. Let us proceed next 
to consider the dead of the sea, who are in our text distin- 
guished from the rest of the dead ; and thence let us pass to 
the effects of their re-union with the rest of mankind, who 
ended their mortal career elsewhere than on the deep. Our 
remaining divisions will be, therefore, 

II. The sea giving up its dead. 

III. The meeting of the dead, so given up of the sea, 
with the dead of the land. 

II. The sea will be found thickly peopled with the mortal 
remains of mankind. In the earlier ages of the world, when 
the relations of the various nations to each other were gene- 
rally those of bitter hostility, and the ties of a common bro- 
therhood were little felt, the sea, in consequence of their 
comparative ignorance of navigation, served as a barrier, 
parting the tribes of opposite shores, who might else have 
met only for mutual slaughter, ending in extermination. Now 
that a more peaceful spirit prevails, the sea, which once serv- 
ed to preserve, by dividing the nations, has, in the progress 
of art and discovery, become the channel of easier intercourse 
and the medium of uniting the nations. It is the great high- 
way of traffic, a highway on which the builder cannot en- 
croach, and no monarch possesses the power of closing the 
path, or engrossing the travel. Thus continually traversed, 
the ocean has become, to many of its adventurous voyagers, 
the place of burial. But it has been also the scene of battle, 
as well as the highway of commerce. Upon it have been 
decided many of those conflicts which determined the dynasty 
or the race, to whom for a time should be committed the 
empire of the world. It was on the sea, in the light of Sala- 
mis, that the fleets of Greece and Persia contended, whether 
the despotism and wealth of the East should extend their 
widening sway over the freedom and arts of the West. It 
was in the sea-fight of Actium, that the imperial power of 
Rome, then claiming dominion over the world, was assured 
to Augustus and his successors, and the way was prepared 
for the universal peace that reigned at our Saviour's birth. 
On this element was fought the battle of Lepanto, where the 
right arm of the Ottoman was broken. And, as we come down 
to our own times, the fights of Aboukir, Trafalgar, and Na- 
varino, all contests upon the sea, were battles affecting in no 
slight degree the destinies of all Europe, and the civilized 



302 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 

world. All these have served to gorge the deep with the 
carcases of men. It has had, again, its shipwrecks. Though 
man may talk of his power to bridle the elements, and of the 
triumphs of art, compelling all nature to do his work, yet 
there are scenes on the sea in which he feels his proper 
impotence. And when God lets loose his winds, and calls 
up his billows, man becomes sensible of his dependence. 
How many in all ages, since commerce first began her voy- 
ages of profit or discovery, have perished in the waters, 
foundering in the midnight storm, driven on the unsuspected 
rocks, engulfed by the whirlpool, or dashed by winds 
against some iron-bound coast. Even in our own times, 
with all our improvements in the art of navigation, and with 
all the expenditures that are incurred to increase the mariner's 
security, it has been calculated by some, that each year one 
thousand ships are lost at sea. 

The sea, then, has its dead. And when the trump is blown, 
the archangel's summons to the judgment, the sea shall 
give up these its long-buried treasures. The gold and the 
jewels it has accumulated, the "buried argosies," with all 
the rich freight which it has swallowed up, will be permitted 
to slumber unreclaimed; but no relic that has formed part 
of the corpse of a child of Adam will be left unclaimed or 
unsurrendered in that hour. The invalid, who, in quest of 
health, embarked on the sea, and perished on the voyage, 
committed to the deep with the solemn ceremonies of reli- 
gion — the pirate, flung into the waves from a deck which 
he had made slippery with blood — the emigrant's child, 
whose corpse its weeping parents surrendered to the deep on 
their way to a land of strangers — the whaler, going down 
quick into death midst his adventurous employment — the 
wretched slave, perishing amid the horrors of the Middle 
Passage — the sailor, dropt from the yard-arm in some mid- 
night gale — the wrecked, and the dead in battle, all will arise 
at that summons. The mariners of all times, who have died 
on their loved element, those who rowed on the galleys of 
Tyre or Carthage, or manned the swift ships of Tarshish, 
will be there, together with the dead of our own days. The 
idolater, who sunk from some Chinese junk while invoking 
his graven images ; and the missionary of the cross, who, 
like Coke, perished on his way to preach the gospel to the 
heathen, or who, like Chamberlain, compelled to return from 
the field of missionary toil, with shattered health, and all 



THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 303 

wearied and spent with labors for Christ, has expired on his 
homeward way — all, all shall be there. As these shall re- 
appear from the entombing waters, will their coming have 
no effect upon the multitudes who died on the shore, and 
whose bodies also the cemeteries and sepulchres of earth 
shall on that day have restored ? We have thus reached the 
last division of our subject. 

III. The meeting of the dead of the sea with the dead of 
the land. 

1. There must be, then, in this resurrection from the sea, 
much to awaken feeling in the others of the risen dead, from 
this, if from no other cause : these, the dead of the sea, will 
be the kindred and near connections of those who died upon 
the land. Among those whom the waters shall in that day 
have restored, will be some who quitted home expecting a 
speedy return, and for whose coming attached kindred and 
friends looked long, but looked in vain. The exact mode, 
and scene, and hour of their deaths have remained until that 
day unknown to the rest of mankind. And can it be, with- 
out feeling, that these will be seen again by those who loved 
them, and who through weary years longed for their return, 
still feeding " the hope that keeps alive despair?" The dead 
of ocean will be the children and pupils, again, of the dead 
of the land. Their moral character may have been formed, 
and their eternal interests affected, less by their later asso- 
ciates on the deep, than by the earlier instructions they 
received on shore. They may have exhibited on the deck 
and in the forecastle only the examples they witnessed in 
the nursery, ar.d the tempers they cherished, and the habits 
they formed in the home. When these are restored, they 
are restored to witness for or against their parents, and the 
associates of their childhood and youth. These last may 
have died on shore, but by their influence on the mariner, 
they have transmitted their own spirit and moral character 
over the wide waste of waters, to remote and barbarous 
shores. It cannot, in the very nature of the human soul, its 
memory, its affections, and its conscience remaining what 
they now are — it cannot but be a scene of solemn interest, 
when the dead of the land shall behold their kindred dead of 
the sea. 

2. Let it be remembered, again, that a very large propor- 
tion of those who have thus perished on the ocean, will 
appear to have perished in the service of the landsman. 



304 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 

The mariner will appear very generally, we say, to have 
found his watery grave while in the service of those dwelling 
upon shore. Some in voyages of discovery, despatched on 
a mission to enlarge the bounds of human knowledge, or to 
discover new routes for commercial enterprise, and new 
marts for traffic. Thus perished the French navigator La 
Peyrouse, whose fate was to the men of the last generation 
so long the occasion of anxious speculation. Still greater 
numbers have perished in the service of commerce. The 
looms and forges of Britain could not continue to work, and 
famine would stalk through her cities, did not her ships bear 
abroad the manufactures of her artisans to every clime. It 
is to the sailor we owe it that the cottons of Manchester, and 
the cutlery of Birmingham reach even the wigwams of our 
western Indians. Literature employs and needs the seaman, 
and the scholar beyond the Alleghanies studies books that 
were purchased for him in the book-fairs of Germany, and 
brought across the sea by the adventurous mariner. And 
look to the home, and see how many of its delicacies, and 
luxuries, and adornments are brought to us from abroad by the 
sailor's skill and enterprise. And our agriculture needs his 
aid. The grains of the North, and the cotton of the South 
would find little vent, were not the swift ships ready to bear 
them to a market. They have served the church also. By 
them the Pilgrim Fathers reached a refuge on these shores, 
and four\d a home. By them the missionary has been wafted 
to his station in the heathen world. As a people we are 
under special obligations to the art and enterprise of the 
navigator. We are a nation of emigrants. The land we 
occupy was discovered and colonised by the aid of the mari- 
ner. The seaman has, then, been employed in our service. 
And as far as he was our servant, doing our work, we were 
bound to care for his well-being; and if he perished in our 
service, it was surely our duty to inquire whether he perish- 
ed in any degree by our fault. The ten commandments 
.describe the duties of the employer as well as those of the 
parent. Care for the servant as well as the child was one of 
the lessons of Sinai. And though literally the servant named 
in the Decalogue might be only the servant of the household, 
not he who docs service for us at a distance; yet the spirit 
of these commandments is not to be confined by so close and 
literal an interpretation. When our Saviour was asked, 
'Who is my neighbor V he pointed the inquirer to the 



THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 305 

remote and alien Samaritan. All whom we can reach, and 
all whom we use in service, mediate or immediate, we should 
seek to benefit, as far as our power and influence extend. 

3. Others of those buried in the waters have lost their lives 
in defence of those upon the shore. In the last of our wars 
with the mother country, the navy was regarded as the right 
arm of our defence, under God, from the foreign foe. And 
so it has been with other lands. Their possessions, their 
liberties, their families and homes, have been protected by 
the deaths of those whom they have never known, but who 
expired, fighting their battles, leagues away, on the deep sea. 
Are no obligations imposed on us, in behalf of those who 
have thus befriended us, and in behalf of their successors and 
associates'? Can a nation claim the praise of common hones- 
ty or gratitude, who neglect the moral and spiritual interests 
of these their defenders? 

4. Let us reflect, also, on the fact, that many of those who 
have perished on the waters will be found to have perished 
through the neglect of those living on shore. We allude 
not merely to negligence in providing the necessary helps 
for the navigator. The Government, that should leave the 
shoals and reefs in its harbors unmarked by buoys, and that, 
along a line of frequented but dangerous sea-coast, should 
rear no light-houses, would be held guilty of the death of all 
shipwrecked in consequence. But may there not be other 
classes of neglect equally or yet more fatal? The parent 
who has neglected to govern and instruct his child, until that 
child, impatient of all restraint, rushes away to the sea as a 
last refuge, and there sinks, a victim to the sailor's sufferings 
or the sailor's vices, can scarce meet, with composure, that 
child in the day when the sea gives up its dead. Or if, as a 
community, or as churches, we shut our eyes to the miseries 
of the sick and friendless seaman, or to the vices and oppres- 
sions by which he is often ruined for time and eternity, shall 
we be clear in the day when inquisition is made for blood? 
No, unless the church does her full duty, or in other words, 
reaches in her efforts the measure of her full ability, for the 
spiritual benefit of the seaman, her neglect must be charge- 
able upon her. Now, in the Saviour's description of the 
condemnation of sinners at the last day, it will be observed, 
that he selects instances, not of sins of commission, but of 
sins of omission, as destroying the world. " In as much as 
ye did it not" is the ground of the doom pronounced, 



306 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 

May not the perishing sailor take up most of the items of 
that sentence, and charge them home upon many of the 
professed disciples of Christ 1 Neither by influence, nor 
prayers, nor alms, did they relieve his temporal and spiritual 
destitution, when hungry, or thirsty, or sick, or naked, or 
in prison. And far as this neglect operated to form the 
habits that hastened his death, and led, perhaps, to his eter- 
nal ruin, so far it cannot be desirable to think of meeting 
him again, among those who shall rise in the last day from 
the ocean depths, to stand with us before the judgment seat. 
5. Many, we remark lastly, of the dead of the sea will be 
found to have been victims to the sins of those upon shore. 
Those who have perished in unjust wars waged upon that 
element, will they have no quarrel of blood against the 
rulers that sent them forth ? The statesmen, the blunders 
or the crimes of whose policy the waters have long con- 
cealed, must one day face those who have been slaughtered 
by their recklessness. How many of the victims over whom 
the dark blue sea rolls its waters, have perished, year by 
year, in the nefarious slave trade. Such is the large propor- 
tion of the miserable children of Africa who. die on the voy- 
age, that, along the ordinary course of the slave ship from 
the eastern shores of Africa to our own continent, the deep 
must be strewn, and the bottom of the sea, at some portions 
of the way, paved with the remains of those who have been 
torn from their country and home, by the orders or conni- 
vance of the slave-trader, to perish on the ocean. In the 
day of the resurrection that galaxy of skeletons will rise; 
and the voice of wailing and accusation, stilled for centuries 
beneath the waters, will be lifted up to be stilled no more 
for ever. And so it may be said of every other form of wick- 
edness, of which those that sail in our ships are rendered the 
instruments or the victims. The keeper of the dram shop, 
or the brothel, where the sailor is taught to forget God and 
harden himself in iniquity, will not find it a light thing, in 
that great day of retribution, to encounter those whom he 
made his prey. The seaman may not have died on the pre- 
mises of his tempter, in drunken riot; but out upon the far 
ocean he may have carried the habits there acquired, and 
died, the victim of intemperance, or profligacy, in a climate 
far removed from that where he was first lessoned in the 
ways of ruin, sinking perhaps in a shipwreck, caused, as many 
shipwrecks have been caused, by the intoxication of the 






THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 307 

commander or his crew. But the sea does not contain all 
the victims among its sons, who have thus been destroyed 
by the vices learned of the landsman. Many a sailor thus 
corrupted has perished on shore in a drunken broil, or pined 
away in some foreign hospital, or ended his days in a prison. 
Human laws seized not on those who first ensnared him ; 
but will divine laws be equally indulgent, or equally remiss ? 
The literature of the shore will be called to account for its 
influence on the character and well-being of the seaman. 
The song writer, who, perhaps, a hungry and unprincipled 
scribbler, penned his doggrel lines in some garret, little careful 
except as to the compensation he should earn, the dirty 
pence that were to pay for his rhymes, will one day be made 
to answer for the influence that went forth from him to those 
who shouted his verses, in the night watch, on the far sea, 
or perchance upon some heathen shore. The infidel, who 
may have sat in elegant and lettered ease, preparing his 
attacks upon the Bible and the Saviour, thought little, proba- 
bly, but of the fame and influence he should win upon the shore. 
But the seeds of death which he scattered may have been 
wafted whither he never thought to trace them. And in 
that day of retribution, he may be made to lament his own 
influence on the rude seaman whom he has hardened in blas- 
phemy and impiety; and who has sported with objections 
derived by him at the second hand or third hand from such 
writers, whilst he figured amongst his illiterate and admiring 
companions, as the tarred Voltaire or Paine of the forecastle 
and the round top, the merriest and boldest scoffer of the 
crew. 

The meeting, then, of the dead of the land with the dead 
of the sea will be one of dread solemnity, because of the ties 
of kindred and influence that bound them together — and 
because multitudes of those buried in the deep died in the 
service of the landsman, or in his defence, many by his ne- 
glect, and many as the victims of the varied wickedness in 
which he had instructed, hardened, or employed them. 
Those who have been allied in sin, and accomplices in trans- 
gression, will find it one of the elements of their future 
torment, to be associated together in the scenes of the last 
judgment, and in those scenes which lie beyond that day. 
The animosity, revenge, and hate of the unregenerate heart, 
then released from all restraint, and exasperated by despair, 



308 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 

will find vent, and rage uncontrolled through the sinner's 
long eternity of wo. 

In conclusion, let us dwell on some of the practical results 
of the theme we have considered. 

1. The dead shall rise, all shall rise, and together. From 
the land and from the sea, wherever the hand of violence, 
or the rage of the elements have scattered human dust, shall 
it be reclaimed. And we rise to give account. We rise to 
be judged. If, my hearers, we would anticipate that judg- 
ment, we might, as the apostle assures us, escape it, "for if 
we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged."* If, 
feeling our sins, we do, as penitents, confess and forsake 
them, and flee to Christ and implore the Spirit, the dawn of 
that day will bring to us no terrors, and the sound of that 
trump be the welcome summons to a higher degree of 
blessedness. Cleansed in the Saviour's blood, renewed by 
the Spirit, and arrayed in the righteousness of Christ, we 
may in that day stand accepted, confident, and fearless. But, 
out of Christ, judgment will be damnation. 

2. If the re-appearance from the seas of the sinner, who 
perished in his sins, be a thought full of terror; is there not, 
on the other hand, joy in the anticipation of greeting those 
who have fallen asleep in Christ, but whose bones found no 
rest beneath the clods of the valley, and whose remains have 
been reserved under the waters until that day, while, over 
their undistinguished resting-place, old ocean with all its 
billows has for centuries pealed its stormy anthem? Then 
to see them freed from decay, and restored to the friends in 
Christ wfro had loved and bewailed them — this will be joy. 
Ensure, Christian parent, the conversion of your sea-faring 
child, and then, whatever may betide him, it shall be well. 
His body may rest as safely amid coral and sea-weed as in 
the church-yard; and his soul fly as swiftly to the bosom of 
Christ from the midst of engulfing waters, as from a death- 
bed, attended by all the watchfulness and all the sympathy 
of weeping friends. 

3. This community especially owes a debt to that class of 
men, who go down to the sea in ships, and do business in 
the great waters. The providence of God seems to indicate 
that our city is yet to become the Tyre of this western world. 
Some have estimated the seamen who yearly visit our port 

* 1 Cor. xi. 31. 



THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 309 

at more than seventy thousand, and suppose the average 
number constantly in our harbor to be from three to five 
thousand. Contributing as they do to the comforts and pros- 
perity of every home, and guarding, as in time of war they 
do, this commercial metropolis, do they not demand and 
deserve a still increasing share in our sympathies and aid? 

4. It is, again, by no means the policy of the church to 
overlook so influential a class, as is that of our sea-faring 
brethren. They are in the path of our missionaries to the 
heathen. If converted, they might be amongst their most 
efficient coadjutors, as, whilst unconverted, they are among 
the most embarrassing hindrances the missionary must en- 
counter. They have, it should be also remembered, in their 
keeping, the highways of the earth, along which travel its 
literature, its commerce, and its freedom. What would be 
thought of the statesmanship or patriotism of the man who, 
in time of war, would propose surrendering to the enemy 
all the roads and bridges of the land, in hopes of retaining 
possession of the rest of the territory? The mere proposal 
would be regarded as combining folly the most absurd, and 
treason the most disastrous. Yet what else is the church 
doing, if she relinquish the sea-faring class to the influence 
of sin and to the will of the destroyer of souls ? She would 
be proposing virtually a most ruinous truce with Satan, when 
resigning these to his unresisted control, and offering to 
abandon to his keeping the keepers of the highways of the 
nations. 

5. While humbled in the review of her past negligence, 
and in the sense of present deficiencies, as to her labors for 
the seaman, the church has yet cause for devout thankfulness 
in the much that has recently been done for the souls of 
those who go down to the sea in ships, and in the perceptible 
change that has already been wrought in the character of 
this long-neglected class of our fellow-citizens and fellow- 
immortals. God has poured out his Spirit even on the inci- 
pient and uncertain efforts of his people ; and from many a 
cabin and forecastle the voice of prayer even now ascends, 
and on many a deck the words of this salvation are read. 
" Let us not be weary in well-doing." 

6. And now, lastly, we ask each of you : In that day, 
when earth and sea shall meet heaven in the judgment, 
where do you propose to stand ? Among the saved, or the 
lost — the holy, or the sinful — at the right hand of the Judge, 



310 



THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 



or at his left? Purposes of partial reformation or of future 
repentance cannot save you. Christ is now waiting to be 
gracious. He who will at last appear as the Judge, now 
comes as the Redeemer. He is now an Advocate ; soon he 
will be the Avenger. Heaven stoops to win you. Hell 
rises to allure and destroy you. Oh, yield not to Satan. 
Reject not Christ; for the Judge is at the door. And not 
this soul only of yours, but this body also must live — must 
live for ever ; and can you wish it to live in endless, hopeless 
misery? A throbbing brow, or an aching tooth, are now 
sufficient to embitter all the enjoyments of life. What will 
it be when the whole body is cast into torment? Can you 
desire to meet your impenitent friends, to spend an eternity 
"together in growing hate and mutual recrimination — to face 
your pious friends, a godly father, or a praying mother, and 
catch your last glance of hope, your last sight of happiness, 
as you see them mounting to glory, whilst you sink your- 
selves into the sea of fire — the lake that burneth with fire 
and brimstone for ever and ever ? 



THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY* 

11 Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, and 
slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that 
dwelt in Jerusalem 7 I tell you. Nay ; but, except ye repent, ye 

SHALL ALL LIKEWISE PERISH." Luke Xiii. 4, 5. 

It was one of the characteristic excellences which marked 
the teachings of our Saviour, that he preached, in the high- 
est and best sense of that phrase, to the times, and his minis- 
try was thus a word in season. He addressed himself to 
men's present duties, and their present sins and snares ; and 
the passing events of the day, or the scenery of the spot 
where he taught, furnished him with ready and apposite illus- 
trations. The news of a cruel butchery, or a melancholy 
calamity ; the tidings that told of the Galileans slaughtered 
over their sacrifices ; or of the unhappy victims in Siloam, 
crushed by a falling tower — the news that for the time was 
the burden of all tongues, and made all ears to tingle, was 
seized by him as affording the occasion of riveting some keen 
truth upon the memory and conscience of the multitude. 
And thus it might be, and ought to be, with us. The jour- 
nals of the day, too often taken up but in the gratification of 
an idle curiosity, that seeks ever to learn and tell some new 
thing, might preach to us of Providence and Eternity. We 
might consult them to see, in the changes they record, how 
God is governing his own world, with a care that never slum- 
bers, and a wisdom that never falters. For all that occurs, 
from the fall of a dying sparrow to the crash of an empire 
overthrown, is but as He bids or permits it, who " doeth 

* A Discourse, on occasion of the explosion in the (J. S. ship of war, 
Princeton, near Washington, on the 28th of February, 1844, by which the 
Secretary of State, and the Secretary of the Navy, with others, lost their 
lives. Delivered before the Amity Street Baptist Church, Sabbath morning, 
3d March, and before the Oliver Street Baptist Church. Sabbath evening. 
10th March, 1844. 



312 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the 
inhabitants of the earth."* 

An event such as that upon which our Redeemer comment- 
ed, has occurred amongst ourselves. In the metropolis of 
our nation, the seat of our government, where so much of the 
intellect of the nation is congregated, and whence so wide 
an influence goes forth to the ends of our land, death has 
made recently its fell inroads. The shadows of the sepulchre 
have fallen, as in sudden and disastrous eclipse, upon the 
high places of our republic. A new vessel of war, built 
with lavish expenditure, in which science had shown her terri- 
ble skill in inventing new engines of death of fearful potency, 
had become to that city the theme of general curiosity and 
admiration. Hundreds of guests thronged her decks. Some 
of them were the young, the gay, and the fashionable ; others 
were the aged, the experienced and the influential, citizens 
distinguished by the station they occupied, or the talents they 
had displayed. Little did that stately vessel, beneath a bril- 
liant sky, in her holiday trim, and with her exulting company, 
seem the fitting scene for auguries of disaster, or the intru- 
sion of distress. Below, all was merriment and gaiety, 
whilst the laugh, the jest, and the song, were intermingled 
with their feastings. The spot consecrated in the hearts of 
this nation, as that of the abode and last resting-place of the 
Father of his country, was near. The memory of the mighty 
dead was not forgotten by the inmates of that vessel as she 
floated along. But alas ! death was much nearer to that re- 
joicing throng, than in the tomb where reposed the mortal 
remains of Washington. " Couched in grim repose," the de- 
stroyer had already marked fresh and nearer prey. Above, 
on the deck of that majestic ship, preparations are made to 
discharge anew the piece of ordnance already so famed for 
its destructive power, but soon to obtain yet more disastrous 
fame. Men eminent in station, acting some of them in the 
cabinet of our Chief Magistrate, as his chosen advisers, and 
one of their number but a few days installed in his high trust, 
had gathered around. The discharge took place. Amid the 
smoke and din, shrieks were heard. When that smoke had 
passed away, the newly invented engine of destruction was 
seen itself a ruin, after having made that deck a scene of des- 
olation and carnage. Two of the ministers of our govern- 

* Daniel iv. 35. 



THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 313 

merit, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of the Navy, 
with others of the distinguished visiters, lay on that blood- 
\>espattered deck, disfigured and mutilated, either breathless 
or gasping their last. How startling and hideous the contrast 
between the scenes which but the narrow breadth of that deck 
then separated ; the mangled, the dying and the dead, who 
were above it, and their nearest relatives, their daughters and 
their wives, who, cheerful and unconscious, were gathered in 
joyous groups below it, as yet utterly ignorant of the appall- 
ing reality. Those thus suddenly deprived of friends had 
discerned, in the shock of the discharge, no unwonted and 
foreboding sounds, nor did they dream of the irreparable be- 
reavement that one brief moment had brought upon its wings 
of doom. Who shall paint the anguish of an attached wife, 
that had gone forth in the morning radiant in happiness and 
hope, but who was now to return at evening to a desolate 
home and an orphan charge, a new-made widow, meeting her 
fatherless babes with the cry of Naomi in her heart : " Call 
me Mara, for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me, 
for I went out full, and the Lord hath brought me home again 
empty ;" — of daughters held back by friendly violence, from 
the sight of a father's mangled remains — of children left in 
an instant fatherless, and of friends who had gone forth to 
begin together a day of rejoicing, but its evening closed on 
the survivor mournfully bringing back his dead. The station 
of several of the victims, the presence of their dearest kin- 
dred, and the festive occasion that had assembled them, all 
heightened the horror of the scene. In the tumultuous and 
irrepressible distress of the hour, the mercy might perhaps 
be forgotten that was yet intermingled with the calamity — 
the guardian care that had given to the multitude endangered 
so narrow an escape. For the time, dismay, amazement and 
horror, filled all hearts. Yet, as it is now easy to see, mercy 
had watched even over that scene of ^carnage, and lightened 
the weight of the infliction, or how easily might a far more 
sweeping desolation have occurred ; and of the hundreds 
there embarked, but a few frenzied survivors only might 
have escaped the general wreck, each ready in his distraction 
to deem himself alone in his deliverance, and each eager to 
say in the language of those messengers who came with 
heavy tidings to the patriarch : " I only am escaped alone to 
tell thee." 

46 Hear ye the rod," cried the prophet, " and who hath 
41 



314 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

appointed it." Such is the command of our God, by his serv< 
ant Micah, to the community thus suddenly and sorely visited, 
Does calamity befall us, it is not voiceless. It was no blind 
chance that launched the bolt. Trouble springs not out of 
the dust, nor is it dumb. The Scriptures give speech and 
articulate utterance as it were, to each such bereavement ; 
and, as the tomb opens to receive its new tenants, a still, 
small voice is heard issuing from its dim chambers, a voice 
of remonstrance and warning, of tender expostulation and 
compassionate entreaty. And as our text shows us, we have 
not only the warrant of our Saviour's example, for making 
such seasons the occasion of religious instruction ; but we 
have here, in the records of the evangelist, the exact lessons 
w r hich such scenes of sudden and public calamity were intend- 
ed to illustrate and to enforce. May His Spirit enable us 
rightly to read, and honestly to apply them. 

Some of the judgments of the Divine Providence need no 
interpreter. Sorrow and guilt are, in the natural workings 
of man's conscience, and in the general estimate of mankind, 
closely conjoined. And there are times, as when a Nadab 
perishes before the altar he has desecrated, or an Uzzah is 
blasted beside the ark — as when the storm of fire comes 
down upon the cities of the plain, or the ark of Noah rides 
on the whelming waters past the hapless and despairing sin- 
ners who had derided his warnings — when God's judgments 
follow so closely man's transgressions, that he who runs 
may read the purport of the visitation, and see in the pecu- 
liar guilt of the sufferers, the reason of their peculiar fate. 
But it is not always so. Men are, in our days, as in the 
times of the Saviour they were, prone, on hearing of some 
strange and sudden calamity, to indulge themselves in rash 
and uncharitable judgments. They think of the suffer- 
ers as more careless or more criminal than others, and sup- 
pose them to have become thus the victims of an avenging 
Providence. Judging of character as the mass of mankind 
do, merely from the success which attends it, attributing 
excellence when they see prosperity, and imputing guilt or 
weakness where they discover the presence of adversity, they 
adopt the rule on which Job's friends so tenaciously and 
cruelly insisted, that calamity is proof of crime ; a rule that, 
in the use of it by those misguided patriarchs, God so signally 
disavowed and rebuked. It was on this same false principle 
that the Saviour himself was judged by his own countrymen 



THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 315 

and cotemporaries, " We," said the prophet, speaking by 
anticipation in the name of his people — " we did esteem him 
stricken, smitten of God and afflicted." And was he not 
heavily afflicted, stricken most sorely, and was it not God 
that smote and bruised him ? It was indeed so ; but not, as 
they supposed, for the peculiar sins of the sufferer himself. 
*' The Man of Sorrows," on whom all griefs centered, was 
yet " holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners." 
In our text, the Redeemer, as he speaks of the slaughtered 
Galileans, and of the falling tower, rebukes this spirit of rash 
judgment. He does not deny, indeed, that sin was found 
in Pilate's victims, and in those who died at Siloam : but he 
asks ; " Were they sinners more than others ? Were they 
more deserving this fate than yo urselves ? Except ye repent, 
ye shall all likewise perish" The connection which the mind 
of man traces, instinctively as it were, between sin and suf- 
fering, is not to be made to concentrate upon the individual, 
but rather to rebound back on the conscience of the race ; 
not to rest on the head of the stranger who perishes, but 
rather on the heart of the survivor who witnesses it, and who, 
were God but strict in the immediate exaction of punish- 
ment, deserves to share the ruin which he has but beheld. 

We cannot, then, misinterpret Providence, when we have 
thus the comments of the Lord himself, who wields the scep- 
tre of the universe. It is the Legislator of the world, sitting 
to interpret his own statutes, and to expound the reasons of 
his own procedure. He teaches us, that the fate of one is 
the desert of all ; that as sinners we all merit a sudden and 
violent end, and that except we repent, we ultimately and 
universally perish. These are humbling truths, it must be 
confessed, but they are salutary. Let us ponder them, in the 
order in which our Saviour's language presents them. 

I. All of us are sinners. 

Christ's hearers were such as well as the Galileans, the 
survivors as well as the sufferers, and we as well as those 
whose death we deplore. 

II. All of us are liable to sudden death. 

III. Death to the impenitent sinner is destruction. 

IV. Repentance is our only safeguard from eventual ruin. 
I. We are all sinners. " Think ye they were sinners above 

all men ? I tell you, Nay : but except ye repent, ye shall all 
likewise perish." 

The fact of man's sinfulness is one scarce needing to be 



316 T HE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

argued. The conscience of the world and the history of the 
world, are here in accord with the Scriptures of the world's 
Maker and Judge. Our own observation and the experience 
of those around us, who have been most and longest conver- 
sant with Human Nature, and our complaints against our 
fellow-men, attest the melancholy truth which Scripture ut- 
ters in no dubious terms. When God looked down from 
heaven to behold the children of men, he saw " none good, 
no, not one." We are each, by nature, the children of wrath, 
even as others. We may dispute the statement as to our- 
selves, and a few select favorites, but we are generally prone 
not only to admit but to assert it of the mass of society. 
Our complaints of governments and whole classes of society 
and entire nations, show that we do not deem the multitude 
of mankind faultless. What page of the world's history is 
not blotted with tears and stained with blood — tears which 
man's misconduct has wrung from the eyes of suffering 
weakness — blood which man's violence has shed ? But we 
need not go to men's vices to prove their sinfulness; it is 
proved too sufficiently by their very virtues. For what vir- 
tue save that exhibited in the one character of Christ, is per- 
fect, symmetrica], stainless ? The confessions of men, like 
Daniel, the man greatly beloved of heaven, under the old 
dispensation, and the defects of John, the beloved disciple 
of Christ under the new dispensation, are decisive as to the 
defective and imperfect character of man on the earth. And 
if not sinners, what need, again, had the race of a Redeem- 
er % By the heights of glory from which the Ransomer 
needed to plunge when he rescued us, I may gauge the 
depths of debasement and guilt into which the ransomed had 
sunk ; and the moral demerit of the first Adam may be in- 
ferred from the tremendous sacrifice, and the infinite dignity 
demanded in the second Adam, who came to deliver and to 
save him. Let us remember our sinfulness, that we may know 
our true position before the Holy Ruler of the universe. 
We are not the innocent beings which He at first made us. 
We were formed upright, but we have " sought out many 
inventions," and perverse and rebellious inventions they 
have been. The guilt is our own, an invention of mankind. 
Hence it is, and not by any original perversion in our crea- 
tion, that sorrow and anguish have entered our world, and 
become the heritage of our race. Bereavement and death 
are strangers, who have intruded into God's happy universe, 



THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 317 

and for whose admission into our own world, our own hands 
have torn a pathway. The very presence of death is evi- 
dence of sin. " Death" entered " by sin, and so death passed 
upon all men for that all men have sinned."* And when 
we view its ravages in those we love, or but read its record 
in the obituary or upon the gravestone, we are admonished 
afresh of that truth uttered beside the cross of the world's 
Redeemer. The lips of the dying thief then, at least, spoke 
truly, and what he said to an expiring companion, belongs 
as justly to each one of our dying race, " Thou art in the 
same condemnation." Afflictions and bereavements, the 
removal of our friends, the calamities witnessed in the high 
places of our land, are proofs of our common sinfulness. 

But though afflictions prove our common sinfulness, they 
afford in this world no test as to our comparative sinfulness. 
The man less afflicted here on earth is not therefore more 
holy than his neighbor who is more afflicted. The towers 
of Siloam fell, while turrets in more guilty districts of Jeru- 
salem stood immovable. The hapless Galilean mingled his 
blood with his sacrifices at the altar, while the more guilty 
Caiaphas was permitted to wear undisturbed his pontifical 
tiara, and the wretched Judas yet possessed, in comparative 
security, the dignity and privileges of the Apostleship. But 
the death of the poor peasants from the shores of Gennesa- 
reth, on the one hand, and the lengthened life of the high 
priest, and of the false apostle, on the other hand, were no 
proofs that the earliest victims were the chiefest sinners. 
Pilate, who had commanded the massacre, was doubtless, 
in the sight of God, although still surviving, a greater of- 
fender than those men whom he had butchered. When our 
Heavenly Father singles out a man, as the subject of an 
afflictive dispensation, it is no proof that he is peculiarly 
guilty above all his fellows. 

Again, when God sends a sweeping visitation on a people, 
he often involves the righteous and the wicked in an indis- 
criminate death. It is not, indeed, always so ; at times God 
sees fit to make distinctions even in this life in behalf of his 
servants that fear him. This it was for which Abraham 
pleaded when the storm was gathering over the devoted 
cities of the plain. " To slay the righteous with the wicked 
— that be far from thee : shall not the Judge of all the earth 

* Romans v.. 12. 



318 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

do right?" This it was in which the Psalmist trusted, and 
in which he exhorted others to trust. " A thousand shall 
fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand ; but it 
shall not come nigh thee." And thus it was that the three 
Hebrew children walked unharmed in the heart of that fur- 
nace, whose fiery mouth destroyed others that came near 
only to feed its flames. And thus it was that Daniel sat 
unharmed amid lions who brake of his adversaries every 
bone in their body ere they reached the bottom of the den. 
God may specially preserve his servants from afflictions that 
destroy others. He did it, perhaps, more under the Old 
Testament dispensation than under the New, because the 
earlier dispensation was especially one of temporal rewards 
and deliverances, and of prompt punishments. But under 
either economy, God often has seen fit to make the righteous 
and the sinner fall indiscriminately in some common calam- 
ity. It had been so in the days of Solomon, and he observ- 
ed it : " All things come alike to all. There is one event 
to the righteous and to the wicked — to him that sacrificeth, 
and to him that sacrificeth not."* He observed it, we say, 
and not yet having reached the conclusion which he ulti- 
mately attained, and with which he shuts up his book,f the 
bringing of every work in eternity to a just judgment ; not 
yet having found (for the book is a diary of doubts ending 
in certainty, and inquiries that grope after and at last clutch 
the truth) — not yet having gained the clue to the mystery, 
and the solution of his difficulties, a clue and solution which 
he afterwards found in the retributions of the last judgment, 
he for the time exclaimed, as he beheld the common fate of 
the good and the bad : " This is an evil among all things 
that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto 
all. "J In days long preceding those of this wise monarch, 
the same fact had been perceived and lamented. Job mourn- 
fully exclaimed, that in times of sudden and general calam- 
ity, the righteous perished with his ungodly neighbor. "If 
the scourge slay suddenly, he (it) will laugh at the trial of 
the innocent. "§ In other words, when the instrument of 
the divine vengeance is uplifted, be the rod what it may, it 
makes a wide and fell swoop, and it scorns to linger that it 
may draw distinctions between the innocent and the guilty. 
The distinction is left to the eternal world. It is drawn 

* Ecclcs. ix. 2. t Eccles. xii. 13, 14. 1 Ecules. ix. 3. § Job ix. 23. 



THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 319 

sufficiently at the bar of Final Judgment. " Then shall ye 
return and discern between the righteous and the wicked."* 
For piety in the best is no safeguard from death, or from a 
sudden, a violent, a painful, or a shameful end. 

Often, in fact, the guilt of a sinful community may fall 
most heavily on the heads of its most innocent members. 
When the righteous Josiah fell in battle with the king of 
Egypt, the sins of the guilty Jews lighted on the head of 
their pious monarch. And so when Naboth perished in the 
days of Ahab, and Zachariah was stoned between the porch 
and the altar, and James the Apostle was beheaded by 
Herod to please the people of the Jews, each of the victims 
was taken away, in fact, not so much because of his own 
sins, as because of the sins of others who survived him. 
" The righteous is taken from the evil to come." The 
nation is left with an intercessor less to avert the coming 
vengeance ; and often with one enormity more to swell their 
coming account. One more twig is withdrawn from the 
lessening dyke that as yet shuts out the rising flood of wrath 
and ruin from a guilty land. 

A similarity of fate is then no proof of an equal sinfulness. 
Go with me to the camp of Israel as they are entering the 
Promised Land. A curse from God has retarded the ad- 
vance of their armies. They have selected one individual 
as the cause of their disasters. And they are stoning him 
in the valley of Achor. Let us. go down some centuries 
later in the stream of their history. Accompany me again, 
and without the walls of Jerusalem I show you a similar 
victim enduring the like fate. But the resemblance in their 
fate proves no similarity in their character ; for the one of 
these hapless sufferers is Achan, the troubler of Israel, and 
the other is the righteous Stephen, who dies with his face 
shining like that of an angel, blesses with parting breath his 
ferocious murderers, and lifts heavenwards eyes that have 
been already purged from earthly films, to discern the Son 
of Man standing in glory and power at the right hand of the 
Father, a Saviour waiting to welcome and to crown the pro- 
tomartyr of his Church. The same disaster that sweeps one 
soul away to the horrors of eternal despair, may waft an- 
other to the endless harpings of heaven : and angels and de- 
mons may hover over the same field of death, commissioned 

* Malachi iii. 18. 



320* THE XESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

the one to bear their exulting charge to the Father's home, 
the other to drag their despairing prey to the abodes of wail- 
ing, to be plunged into the pit of unquenchable fire. 

While death, then, proves us all sinful, the mode of our 
death affords no standard of our relative sinfulness. The 
murderer may, like the elder Herod, die on his pillow, while 
the martyr of Christ expires on the rack. And the same 
judgment which admits one of its victims to the rest of 
Paradise, may consign another, who perished at his side, to 
the flames of hell. 

If any of my hearers are slow to allow their own sinful- 
ness, slow to feel the justice of the Saviour's warning as to 
their own case, and that, except they repent, they shall like- 
wise perish, we would urge upon their consideration but 
one more fact as bearing on the question of their sinfulness. 
Your dread of death, that instinctive horror of the grave 
which all feel, what is it but an implied confession of un- 
worthiness and want of moral fitness for the change dissolu- 
tion brings? Man's fear of death is itself, we say, proof of 
sin. For believing, as well nigh all of us do, that death will 
bring us nearer to God, and place us more immediately than 
before in his presence, we must also acknowledge that He 
to whom death thus approximates us is the holiest, and best, 
and happiest of beings. To enjoy the nearer society of such 
a Deing, must then be increased felicity to all the good. If 
we were really holy, would not the anticipation of such ad- 
mission to the presence of God be the highest solace to be 
found amid the cares and conflicts of life '! Should we not 
long for the day of our introduction to the presence-chamber 
oi the great King ; and, in the language of the poet of 
Methodism, should we not "press to the issues of death?" 
Should we not habitually, with Paul, long to depart? But 
we do, in fact, dread death. And that we do thus shrink 
from it, involving, as that event does, a nearer approach to 
God, is in itself an impeachment of our moral character. 
To have a disiike of God's society is in itself a sinful state 
of feeling. It is a confession, on our part, of the want of 
holiness, and of the requisite sympathy with pure and heav- 
enly beings. This dread of death may be regarded as an 
unconscious reminiscence of our old and original state of 
sinlessness, and its forfeited privileges. Then the presence 
of God, when he visited the garden of Eden, was the delight 
and glory of our unfallen parents. But soon as they sinned 






THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 321 

His presence became formidable. It was that of the detect- 
or and the avenger : and they shrank from the blaze of eyes 
too pure to look upon iniquity. Let men talk as they may 
of their own moral blamelessness before God, and of the 
moral dignity of the race, the general dread of death is in 
itself the acknowledgment of a state of heart that could not 
exist in a sinless being. It is this sense of moral defect and 
demerit that arms the destroyer with his terrors, and that 
points and envenoms the dart with which he threatens us. 
The sting of death is sin. 

II. From the truth of our common sinfulness we pass to 
one of its consequences, our common liability to a death 
that may be unexpected and violent. We are all liable to 
sudden death. "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise 
perish." And this is the second division of our remarks. 

That each of us is exposed to sudden death is a truth none 
will dispute, yet, like other undeniable truths, it is not suf- 
ficiently remembered. As death is the original penalty of 
sin, and the iirst existence of sin in us incurred that dread 
punishment, God has at any time, and however suddenly, a 
right to exact from us the penalty. And there is wisdom 
and mercy in his making the execution sudden. It is the 
more startling to others, our fellow-offenders. The possi- 
bility of it, and our apprehension of it, may restrain us from 
many a sin into which we might else have rushed, had we 
been assured of any long term of impunity, or any protract- 
ed interval between our transgression and our removal. It 
is kind, we say, in our heavenly Father, by these sudden 
deaths, to set up mementoes, as it were, of man's mortality, 
in all our scenes of business and amusement ; that we may 
thus in no spot feel ourselves entitled to forget him ; and 
that he may thus hedge up the way of the transgressor with 
salutary terrors, by letting in upon every point the dread 
light of eternity, and making each eminence along the path- 
way command the prospect of an opening grave. 

And in the accomplishment of that sentence of death 
which man's sin has provoked, how various are the means 
employed. Naught is so trivial but that God can make it 
the executioner of his vengeance, be it the worm that smote 
the pride of Herod, or the smooth pebble of the brook that 
cleft the brow of Goliah. Naught is so vast and unwieldy, 
but that it readily lends itself to accomplish suddenly man's 
removal into eternity. The air, with all the winds and 

42 



322 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

storms that store its arsenals, the waters, and the solid earth, 
are ready to do his bidding, and avenge his quarrel with his 
creature, man. The first deluge of water, and the last del- 
uge of fire, either serves, at his pleasure, to purge his earth 
of sinners. But, besides these more stately and solemn 
messengers, how many less noticeable emissaries has he at 
his command. The starting of a horse, the obstructed valve 
of an engine, a failing plank in the vessel's side, a sunken 
rock no navigator has discovered and designated on no 
chart, a misplaced step, a falling tile — all may be his effec- 
tual messengers. And so in any scene, the ball-room, the 
theatre, the warehouse, or the highway, as well as in the 
home, we may be summoned. Death has all seasons and 
all scenes for his own. Invited to a festive excursion, we 
nvay, for aught that we know, be but decking ourselves as 
smiling and garlanded victims for the place of sacrifice. 
Such was the coming of the last messenger to those whose 
death has cast a gloom over the face of our land. 

Now, if death be ever terrible, he is especially so when 
his coming is sudden. When, instead of making sickness 
and slow decay his forerunners, he dispenses with these 
harbingers and appears unannounced, his coming makes 
many a stout heart quail. The thread we had looked to see 
slowly attenuated and long drawn out, is snapped, as with a 
stroke, rudely and for ever. Life, with its cares, and hopes, 
and vanities, and eternity, with its tremendous retributions, 
are brought into startling proximity, and seem the more 
strongly contrasted. But chiefly is sudden death terrible, 
because many, even of those habitually ready for another 
world, feel as if they would wish some interval between the 
secular business of this life and its close, some span, not only 
to set their house in order, but to scrutinize their own hopes 
for eternity, and fit the soul for its dread change as it hov- 
ers on the verge of another world. But to the sinner how 
awful is it to be cut off from his cherished hope that he may 
be allowed, before quitting earth, a brief preparation ! 
This great work, which should be his first care, he, from a 
desire of enjoying the world, makes his last ; and defers to 
the hurry, delirium, and feebleness of a death-bed the great 
business of a life-time. To cut him off suddenly is, then, to 
deprive him of his favorite resort, and to flood, in stern ven- 
geance, that refuge of lies in which he had proposed to take 
a final shelter from the wrath of God, when he might no 



THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 323 

longer enjoy his idols. He had purposed to give to the 
ways of sin the strength of his faculties, and to pour on 
God's altars the last poor dregs of the wine-cup of life : to 
make youth, and health, and zeal, and influence, and energy 
a burnt-offering to Satan, and then to carry the poor offals 
of the sacrifice, age, feebleness, and sickness, to Christ, An 
unexpected death shuts him out from this refuge, where he 
has risked and lost his all. 

But there are those to whom death, and even sudden 
death, is not terrible. Some, like the British Christian, 
whose frequent prayer, answered as it was in the mode of 
his removal, is inscribed on his tomb, have longed for an in- 
stantaneous summons, and exclaimed, " Sudden death, sud- 
den glory." To them the King of Terrors had lost his 
ghastliness, and seemed, in their eyes, but the angel Death, 
commissioned by the Father to release them from cares and 
sins, enfranchise them from all the assaults of temptation, 
and admit them, introduced by the hand of the Mediator, to 
all the glories and all the joys of the beatific vision. 

It is not then the circumstances of our death, be it vio- 
lent and disastrous, or otherwise — be it sudden or lingering, 
that should be the chief question. It is rather the character 
of the dying man, the moral image he carries into the world 
of spirits. What are his relations to God ? Let me die the 
death of the righteous, be it violent or peaceful, be it slow 
decay or some sudden stroke, be it solitary or amid compan- 
ions and friends, be it a rude and agonizing dislodgement of 
the soul from the body, or a gentle and noiseless lapse, as 
of one falling asleep in Christ. 

III. For, and this is the third division of our remarks, 
death to the sinner is destruction, and consequently sudden 
death is, to such, but sudden damnation. This is implied in 
the Saviour's language: " Ye shall all likewise perish." 

Now, this could not mean the future destruction of the 
Jewish people in the fall of Jerusalem, for many sinners 
among his hearers died in their beds before the storm of 
God's wrath burst in all its fierceness upon that guilty and 
doomed city, and ere there were seen yet, even as specks in 
the distant horizon, the Roman eagles gathering eagerly to 
the prey. Nor could it be a violent death, by sword or fall- 
ing tower, like that of the Galileans or the people of Siloam ; 
for we cannot suppose, with any show of reason, that all the 
enemies of Christ among the Jews, who did not perish by 



324 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

the Roman war, died by some other painful end. Nor could 
it be any mere death of the body that he intended, for he 
speaks of it as something which repentance, and repentance 
alone, could enable them to avoid. Now, from the death 
of the body, repentance does not save the man. The peni- 
tent must enter the shroud and the coffin as well as his un- 
godly neighbor. But the evil from which repentance does 
save us, is eternal destruction ; and this, therefore, our Sa- 
viour intends when he uses the word "perishing." It is 
the eternal ruin that awaits the dying sinner. 

Death, although often used but in that narrow sense, in- 
cludes more than the corruption and decay of the body. 
We are in arrears to a violated law. The dissolution of the 
body is but the first instalment of our debt. Death is often 
spoken of as the debt of nature. More justly it might be 
termed the debt of sin ; for our nature, while sinless, as it 
came from the Maker's plastic hand, was not mortal. The 
destruction of the body, then, is but a partial satisfaction of 
the debt which sin owes to the justice of God. And if you 
observe the margin of our text, you will perceive that a 
literal rendering of the word is : " W ere they debtors more 
than others?" The diseases and pains, the decay and disso- 
lution of the body, are but the earlier instalments of the vast 
penalty. Behind it comes the loss of the soul when in the 
resurrection the body has been revivified and re-united to 
the soul, its old associate in sin, and both are cast into the 
lake of fire. This is the second death, and with it eventu- 
ally sinners " perish " by a ruin endless, remediless, and 
hopeless. 

The death of the body is but a transient act, the portal 
through which we pass into the far eternity beyond. It 
puts, indeed, an indelible imprint on a man's character. It 
leaves the filthy eternally filthy, and the holy unalterably 
holy ; stripping the one of all hope, as it exempts the other 
from air fear of a change. It snaps for ever the bond that 
binds the believer while on earth, to care, and temptation, 
and conflict ; and it also sunders the ties of opportunity, 
mercy, and hope, that surrounded and held up the unbe- 
liever, while in this world of probation. Death is not, as 
the journalist too often in the case of the suicide terms it, 
"a termination of existence." This is phraseology said to 
have come in upon us with the Atheism of the French 



THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 325 

Revolution.* Man, at death, it may rather be said, but be- 
gins to exist, in the highest sense of that word. His being 
is developed, and he has higher powers, and wider know- 
ledge, and keener feelings, when made a disembodied spirit. 
And when scepticism would write, as did Revolutionary 
France, over the gateway of the cemetery, the inscription : 
" Death is an eternal sleep," the saddened eye of faith reads, 
in its stead, the more true but melancholy sentence over the 
graves of those who have lived and died without hope and 
without God in the world : " And I looked and beheld a pale 
horse ; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell 
followed with him."] On the dissolution of the body, fol- 
lows, in the case of the ungodly, Hell with all its trooping 
terrors, though its fulness of anguish and its last torments 
may be reserved for the day of judgment. 

How awful is the exchange which the sinner makes at 
death ! " In that very day his thoughts perish ;" his vain 
expectations of worldly enjoyments, of impunity in sin, and 
of a final season and space for repentance ; his earthly plans ; 
and all his rivalries, hopes and fears, which regarded exclu- 
sively the life that then suddenly closed its gates on him and 
closed them for ever. For his pleasures he has endless pain. 
During life, nothing could utterly extinguish hope within 
him ; now, during eternity, nothing can rekindle it. From 
a world of religious privileges, and sacred times, and gra- 
cious invitations, he goes to a world that has no Sabbaths, 
no mercy-seat, no Advocate, no influences of the Spirit, not 
a promise, not a hope. On making the sad exchange, how 
must his forfeited and vanishing blessings brighten in his 
view, as they take their everlasting flight. How strangely 
contrasted, though drawn by the same hand, would be the 
two pictures of this world drawn by the sinner's spirit, when 
as yet without, and again when passed within, the veil that 
hides the eternal world. While yet in the body, and on 
this side the intervening barrier between the world of sense 
and show, and the world of reality, sense and self were all ; 
time was as eternity, and eternity was brief and valueless as 
time. But now, entered on the further world, and when 
both are known by experience, eternity appears in its true 
infinitude, and time shrinks and dwindles into its proper 
littleness. Now Heaven and Hell are no longer dreams, 

* President DwighL . t Rev. vi. 8. 



326 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

and Christ is recognized as really a Saviour, King, and God ; 
but a God now alienated, a King defied and incensed, whose 
power pervades all space and permits no escape, and a Sa- 
viour whose favor is forfeited irrecoverably and for ever. 

Well were it for us if we kept these consequences of death 
more steadily before us. For this purpose, our Heavenly 
Father makes the lessons of our mortality so frequent, im- 
pressive, and various. The dead are quietly glancing upon 
the student from the shelves of his library. History is but, 
in a great measure, spoils won from the grave, or a compi- 
lation of the epitaphs of those who have gone before us. 
Nor is it literature only that is thus redolent of the tomb. 
Each scene of retired and domestic life has its avenues of 
memory and regret that lead back to the grave. Every 
household has its seat by the table and the hearth now 
vacant, where once was seen a face now hidden and buried 
out of sight, and where once w T as heard a voice now stilled 
in the silence of the sepulchre. Who may build himself a 
mansion, however stored with all that can adorn or gladden 
life, and say, Over this threshold the coffin shall not pass ? 
The funeral hearse rolls on its way past the doors of the 
ball-room and the theatre. In the pulpit and at the bar, in 
the Senate chamber or on the main-deck, we see the place 
of the departed, or the scene, it may even be, of their de- 
parture. Thus " Wisdom crieth without ; she uttereth her 
voice in the streets ; she crieth in the chief place of con- 
course ;"* and death is made to unroll its solemn commis- 
sion, and publish its stern testimony in our thronged thor- 
oughfares. Thus, in our own city, the most populous of 
our grave-yards, with vegetation all rank, and a soil fattened 
by the accumulated corpses of a century, draws its sad 
length beside our most crowded street, as if it would throw 
out a dyke to stem the torrent of frivolity and fashion, each 
day rushing by ; and the field of death looks down from its 
silent eminence, upon the long line of banking-houses, and 
the street of our busiest trafficking, as if a skeleton hand 
were beckoning from the spirit land to our merchant princes, 
and bidding them with all their gettings to get wisdom, and 
to consider their latter end that they may be really wise. 
For death to be unprepared is the shipwreck of all hopes 



* l'rov. i. 20. 



THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 327 

and the destruction of all happiness. But how shall we be 
prepared ? 

IV. And thus we reach our fourth and closing division. 
Repentance is our only safeguard. "Except ye repent, ye 
shall all likewise perish." 

To prepare for death, the world knows no fitter method 
than to forget what cannot be evaded, and to drown all se- 
rious reflection in the din of business and amid the tumult 
of revelry. It is like bandaging the eyes to screen us from 
an exploding battery. The less we reflect, the greater, in 
fact, our danger of rushing blindfolded into ruin. It is such 
preparation as Joab gave Amasa when he grasped his beard 
as in friendly greeting, and asked of his health, whilst seek- 
ing the fatal spot where a single stroke would be sure and 
speedy death — a preparation it is that disarms, indeed, of 
anxiety and suspicion, and relieves us of intrusive fears, but 
that, at the same time, robs us of life and seals us to ruin. 
Not such the method of Scripture. It may alarm, but it 
alarms to save. It bids you prepare for death by retreating 
for protection from the impending destruction to that im- 
pregnable refuge, the Saviour's cross. There the penitent 
finds balm for his wounds, pardon for his sins, and life, eter- 
nal life, for his death. 

For " the sting of death is sin." To remove sin is, there- 
fore, the only mode of depriving the grave of its victory, and 
rendering the King of Terrors not only harmless but benefi- 
cent. How shall sin be removed but by renouncing it ; and 
how can we renounce it but in Christ's strength ; or how 
can our repentance be accepted but through his intercession, 
or our sins be forgiven but through his righteousness, or our 
bodies, once consigned to the grave, be released from its 
prison, but as his resurrection becomes the pledge of ours ? 
A true repentance grasps the cross. 

Death, then, preaches repentance. What John the Bap- 
tist cried in the wilderness, and Jesus of Nazareth in the 
streets of Jerusalem, this recent visitation of Divine Provi- 
dence is proclaiming throughout our land, as from its high 
places of dignity and influence : " Repent ye. The axe is 
laid at the root of the trees. Except ye repent, ye shall all 
likewise perish." 

Let the community repent, like Nineveh at the preaching 
of Jonah, and she may escape sore and impending judg- 
ments. What woes were those that overtook the Jewish 



328 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

people because they refused the command and repented not? 
Let a nation be exalted and enriched, as is our own, with 
physical and moral advantages, with all religious and civil 
privileges, an impenitent and godless spirit is yet sufficient 
to squander them all, and leave corruption, disunion, decay 
and subjection, as her final heritage. Let her, on the other 
hand, however afflicted and debased, but repent ; and God 
can restore her from the deepest degradation, exalt and bless 
and establish her, till she that was servant of servants comes 
to sit as a queen among the nations. 

Let the individual sinner repent. It is, by the will and 
the oath of God, his only hope of escaping the second death 
and evading the horrible pit of hell, on whose verge his un- 
happy step already wanders. It assures him of his ultimate 
deliverance, not only from the fear of death, but from all 
fears and all care, temptation and sin ; and it houses the 
fugitive, at last, in the bosom of God. Does he ask : How 
am I to repent? We answer: Not of some sins only, but 
of all sins. Renounce your idols. Turn to Christ for par- 
don. Resolve in his strength. Plead his merits and trust 
his cross. In his name ask for light, and follow it when 
given. And not only clasp but wear the cross, making it 
your badge before the world, as well as your plea before 
God ; and this done, the earth sinks subjected beneath your 
feet, hell withdraws baffled of its aim and spoiled of its prey, 
and Heaven comes nearer the nearer you draw to the inevi- 
table tomb. 

Are you a penitent? Then, however young and feeble 
and obscure you may be, you are contributing to avert, as 
the impenitent is contributing to attract, the clouds and the 
resounding tempests of God's wrath. Are you careless ? 
Careless amid death and bereavement and danger ? Careless 
amid Sabbaths and Bibles and the Saviour's invitations, and 
the Spirit's stirrings ? Recollect that it is no vain word, no 
braggart threat, but the stern law of the skies : " He, that 
being often reproved, hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be 
destroyed, and that without remedy." 

Let the world tell you what it will of natural innocence, 
and a morality of your own with which God cannot be 
angry, remember the world is not the law-giver or the judge 
in this matter. It must itself bide the law and face the 
Judge. That law is : Turn or perish ; Repent and live. It 
is the fiat of your Creator, Saviour and Judge. Repent, 



THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 329 

then, we entreat you, and be saved ; for it is mercy that 
calls, an infinite and divine forbearance that yet waits, and 
Heaven itself stoops to allure, to welcome and to shelter 
you. 

Thus have we reviewed the lessons of eternal truth our 
Saviour has annexed to such dispensations of his Provi- 
dence, as that which we are now remembering. We have 
seen how each such calamity proclaims man's sinfulness, 
reminds us of our common and continual exposure to an end 
as sudden, bids us remember the destruction that waits on 
the death of the impenitent, and commands us to exercise 
that repentance which alone saves from Hell and fits for 
death. Each such dispensation reveals to us, as by a sudden 
flash, the benighted sea of life which we are traversing, and 
the dim shores of the eternity we are nearing. It comes 
from God as on a mission to man, and while it recalls to him 
his sin and his danger, it also announces his one hope and 
saivation, and bids the penitent see in the cross and tomb of 
his Redeemer the gates of Paradise opened anew on Calvary, 
to a doomed and dying race ; while to the impenitent, it 
tells of a death of despair, and shows below the yawning 
tomb a lower depth and the lurid fires of its torments. It 
compresses our business in one world, and our prospects 
for the next, into three brief words : Repent or Perish. 

In conclusion, we would remark : 

1. First, on the sins of the nation ; for each such visita- 
tion calls us to remember these. Have we not, in many 
things, declined from the ways of our forefathers ? Could 
any candid and intelligent observer claim, for the mass of 
the statesmen of this country in our times, the high charac- 
ter for integrity and moral principle accorded to the fathers 
of the Revolution ? Virtue and talent there are ; but is the 
average of right principle in our great political parties equal 
to that displayed in the times of our forefathers? In the 
growing rapacity and corruption of public servants ; in the 
violence o»f party discord and its venality ; and in the mad- 
ness of passion seen disgracing even the halls of national 
legislation by brawls ; are there auguries for good, as to the 
destinies of the nation thus guided, and of the rising genera- 
tion, thus to be trained and moulded? The desecration of 
the Sabbath ; our national eagerness for gain — our growing 
luxury — the character of our widely spread and cheaper lit- 
erature, much of the best of it frivolous, and much of it 

43 



330 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

worse than frivolous, "sensual and devilish " — are not all 
these causes for humiliation and alarm, and do they not 
afford on such an occasion as this, materials for heart-search- 
ing inquiry and profound and penitent meditation? We 
have, as a people, many and rich mercies, but they are re- 
viewed with safety when regarded as heightening our re- 
sponsibility, and, if neglected and perverted, as enhancing 
the more the darkness of our guilt, and the severity of our 
punishment. We are a young nation, and, to the community 
as to the individual, youth is the season of ardor, hope, and 
boastfulness. If there has been justice in the charge other 
nations have made against us, that we are given to vaunting, 
has not God, in the disaster with which he has now visited 
us, occurring as it did in the Navy, the pride of the nation, 
and not long after another of our vessels of war had perished 
in a night at the mouth of the Mediterranean, taught us how 
powerless for our defence, and how powerful for o.ur ruin, 
he may make our very armaments and ships of war ? 

"They trust in navies, and their navies fail, 
God's curse can cast away ten thousand sail." 

In the anxiety which some display to entangle our country 
in war, is there not shown a recklessness greatly to be 
deprecated 1 We believe government endowed, by the law 
of God, with power to take away human life — the life of the 
individual in the case of crime, and the lives of multitudes 
in the case of a just war. But seeing the butchery, profli- 
gacy and wretchedness which war, even when most just, 
must bring in its train, neither humanity nor piety allows us, 
for any petty cause, to employ this melancholy and last re- 
sort. We may not lightly spread through our borders such 
scenes as God has lately made us to behold on the deck of 
the Princeton. To rebuke the spirit of war may have been 
one merciful design of the recent calamity. It may be easy 
to unleash the hounds of war and give them course over 
some distant territory, by issuing, amid the quiet scenes of 
legislation and diplomacy, the act that exposes leagues of 
defenceless coast to the marauder, or consigns some obscure 
and remote home, upon our frontiers, to pillage and slaugh- 
ter, and all the tender mercies of the savage, the scalping- 
knife and the firebrand. It is not as easily borne to see the 
ruin entering our own habitations, and the slaughter spread 
around and upon us. And now that God has permitted, ill 



THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 331 

his wisdom, one of these gory and hideous spectacles, that 
are but the ordinary accompaniments of battle, to be pre- 
sented in a time of profound peace, and almost beneath the 
shadow of our Capitol, let us pray that the lesson may not 
be lost on the law-makers gathered in those halls, but that 
by its severe, yet salutary schooling, it may " teach our sen- 
ators wisdom."* We believe war, in a just cause, not inde- 
fensible : but it may not be lightly undertaken. It is in no 
careless mood, and for no trivial reasons, that the rulers of 
this people may bring such scenes as those recently witness- 
ed into the houses and the peaceful commercial marine of 
our country ; — make multitudes of their countrywomen as 
suddenly widows ; and doom, by hundreds, unconscious and 
prattling infants thus summarily to orphanage, anc* to all 
the multiform sorrows and perils that beset the path of the 
fatherless. 

2. Next, let us not forget that we have, as a nation, re- 
ceived from the Most High loud and memorable warnings. 
In commercial reverses, has not God checked our reckless 
love of gain ? In the death, shortly after his installation, of 
a former Chief Magistrate, the first instance in the history 
of our country of one dying while administering that high 
office, and in the subsequent removal of members both from 
the executive and from the legislative departments of our 
national government, and now again in this startling calami- 
ty, is not God reading to us, as a people, lessons of humility, 
dependence, and penitence? In the history of our present 
Chief Magistrate, distinguished as he has been by the fre- 
quent and near approach of mortality to his person, whilst 
he himself has been spared, how has God spoken to him, 
and to the whole land, of the uncertainty of life, and that a 
higher power than man's controls the affairs of the world ! 
Having seen, as he has done, death vacating the Presidential 
chair for his occupancy, and soon after vacating again, by 
the death of the statesman who took it, the chair of the Vice 
Presidency he had quitted ; — his predecessor in the first 
office of state falling on his right hand, his successor in the 
second station of dignity in the land falling on his left hand ; — • 
bereaved, as he has been, by the incursions of death into the 
circle of his friends ; bereaved in his home of a consort, 
who, from sharing his exaltation, passed soon to the tomb ; 

*Ps. cv.22. 



332 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

and bereaved in his cabinet, first, of Legare, rich in promise, 
talents, and acquirements, and smitten down in the fullness 
of his strength ; and now of Upshur and Gilmer, his personal 
as well as political friends, men of principle and talent, and 
possessed of the confidence of the people ; — is there not 
much to awaken in his behalf the sympathies and prayers of 
the churches ? Commanded as we are in Scripture to pray 
for them that are in authority, should not the wish of each 
Christian patriot be, that a course so singularly marked may, 
by the grace of God, be sanctified to teach him who has run 
it, the uncertainty of all earthly honors, held as they are by 
the tenure of a life so soon spent, and often so suddenly ter- 
minated ; and should* not our prayer be that he who has 
been, like Paul, " in deaths oft" may also, with the Apos- 
tle, be able to say, as he reviews the course and purpose of 
his life, " to me, to live is Christ," and with Paul to add, 
as he looks fearlessly towards its close, " and to die is 
gain ?" For difficult as is ever and in all conditions the 
Christian's path, and glorious as is his triumph over the 
world in any lot, the difficulty and the glory are each en- 
hanced in the case of exalted station. To serve God and 
his generation faithfully, not in the less embarrassed walks 
of private life, but in a position of eminence, amid the strife 
of tongues, the collisions and wranglings of parties, and the 
thronging snares, the incessant and wasting cares, and the 
heavy responsibilities of public life, needs no ordinary meas- 
ure of divine grace. And happy, as rare, is the worldly 
greatness that does not, in consequence, peril the soul of its 
possessor. And whether tempted unduly to envy or rashly 
to blame those in eminent stations, are we not as a people 
warned, by so many deaths in the high places of our land, 
when not, as is most generally the case, single victims, but 
whole clusters and groups are reaped for the grave — are 
we not warned less eagerly to covet distinctions death so 
soon levels, and more habitually to trust, and more faith- 
fully to serve, that God who only is great, for he is the 
unchangeable and the Almighty one " who only hath immor- 
tality?" 

3. Again, do not incidents of this kind loudly call upon 
the Christians of the land to know their rights and duties? 
Are they not warned, that they never, amid the fierce con- 
flicts of party, and the din and routine of business, forget 
their one profession, and the high principles it involves "? 



THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 333 

Ever is the Judge at hand. His coming is near ; and that 
servant labors most wisely and most safely who does it con- 
tinually, as under his Great Taskmaster's eye. In the con- 
tentions of the day, political or religious, is it not well that 
the image of death should often interpose itself, casting its 
chill and calming shadow over the feverish strifes of the 
hour, lest we cherish against those who oppose us such feel- 
ings as we should not wish to recall over their graves, or to 
be surprised by the summons of death while indulging? It 
seems but too evident that the churches of our day can 
retain their hold upon some great and vital truths only at the 
price of earnest controversy. Yet inevitable as it may be, 
and in its results most beneficial, it must also be admitted, 
that most adverse to piety and happiness are the feelings it 
too often engenders. How harshly do the censures that 
political antagonists or religious controversialists may utter 
against their opponents, sound on the ear, when once the 
subject of them is suddenly entombed ; and how pitiable, as 
we now look back upon them, the exasperated personal 
bickerings of writers, housed in a common sepulchre. It 
was an affecting regret of an eminent scholar — it is Erasmus 
of whom we speak — in the days of the Revival of Letters, 
that one of his opponents had been snatched away by death, 
before they could exchange forgiveness for their mutual 
offences against the law of charity. And if to the political 
contests, ever eager and rife amongst us, must in this age be 
added the social agitation, produced by churches " contend- 
ing earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints," it 
will be, as in the near prospect of the grave, and as in con- 
stant preparation for a sudden departure, that Christians will 
best be harnessed, manfully yet meekly, to defend the truth 
a Saviour bequeathed to their charge, the legacy of a Master 
who overcame by suffering, and who built, as it were, out 
of the cross upon which he had hung, the steps of that 
throne where he sits a crowned conqueror. Above all, let 
Christians remember their duties to their country in the 
closet. That hand, out of which the prophet saw streaming 
beams of glory, where are the hidings of Divine Power, is 
opened in blessings to the believer kneeling in his retire- 
ment. And when the churches invoke it, that hand arms 
itself, as with gauntlet and glaive, for the defence of the 
land, or, as the Psalmist prayed, "takes hold of shield and 



334 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

buckler, draws out also the spear, and stops the way " # of 
the adversaries. Thus works the Almighty where men are 
found who make his right arm their reliance, and who, like 
Daniel, greatly beloved of Heaven, are, like him, constant 
in supplication before the throne, for themselves, and for 
their people, and for the Israel of God. 

4. Death, in all its aspects, is formidable to man the sin- 
ner, except as it is viewed in its relation to the death of 
Christ. And if, from all the scenes of worldly pomp and 
rejoicing, from earth's high places of coveted dignity and 
influence, and from its lowliest nooks of retirement, a path 
is ever found leading to the grave ; so, to the eye of the 
believer, from every scene in life, and from every theme in 
morals or religion, there is opened a broad and direct avenue 
to the grave of his Saviour. The cross of Christ is the 
world's hope. He who became the 

"Death of death, and Hell's destruction," 

was revealed to destroy the works of the devil, " and that 
through death he might destroy him that had the power of 
death ."f To know him is life ; to reject him is the seal of 
the second death, and the earnest of eternal ruin. Well, 
then, may Christ's sacrifice receive the prominence given it 
in Scripture and in the scenes of the eternal world. His 
death was the theme, as Moses the receiver, and Elias the 
reviver, of the law, talked with our Lord, on the mount, 
and " spake of his decease which he should accomplish at 
Jerusalem."| It is the glorying of the ransomed before the 
throne of light. When heaven visits earth, as on the moun- 
tain of transfiguration, and when earth visits heaven, as in 
the ascension of the emancipated and glorified spirit to the 
general assembly and church of the first-born, this one event 
is the bond of their common fellowship, and the death upon 
Calvary is the basis of their common happiness. Exulting 
in this, the saint looks forward to the last trial as but brief, 
and its issue as sure and peaceful. The sinner, rejecting 
the benefits of this sacrifice, does it amid a world which, in 
spite of his irreligion, is none the less a world of bereave- 
ment and death ; and on the verge of another world, in 
which, because of his irreligion, death can never be unstung, 



* Ps. xxxv. 2, 3. t Heb. ii. 14; 1 John iii. 8. X Luke ix. 31. 



THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 335 

whose ruin has no redemption, and on whose dark and heav- 
ing sea of woe breaks no solitary beam of hope. 

5. It is, lastly, the wisdom of man, born as he is the heir 
of mortality, to be living in a state of constant preparation 
for his great change. It was said by that sweet singer of 
our modern Israel, Dr. Watts, in the latter years of his life, 
that each night he composed himself to slumber, little anx- 
ious whether he awoke in time or in eternity. Of that orna- 
ment of the English bench, the Christian magistrate, Sir 
Matthew Hale, it is said that he was once administering jus- 
tice, when a strange darkness overspreading the country, 
joined with some idle predictions that had become current, 
tilled men's minds with alarm, as if the end of the world had 
come. The devout judge proceeded calmly in the discharge 
of his office, wishing, if the world ended, to be found in the 
assiduous fulfilment of his duties. A habitual preparation 
for sudden death would be itself a sufficient preparation, and 
the best, for that judgment which some of our erring breth- 
ren announce as near. 

Are there any scenes or employments in which we should 
not wish to be surprised by the messenger of death ? It is 
scar*ee safe to be employed in them for any time, however 
brief, for that brief hour may bring the close of our days, 
and seal up our history to the time of the end. Let us not 
indulge in those things, or busy ourselves in those employ- 
ments, to be surprised in which would be our shame and our 
ruin at the hour of death, lest we be like " the wicked, 
driven away in his wickedness." And what can be more 
tremendous in prospect than this ? Let poverty the 
most grinding afflict me — let me be racked by disease — 
let helplessness, exile, and shame wait around my death-bed ; 
but let not sin, unrepented and unforgiven sin, be the com- 
panion and curse of my dying hours, for then I perish. 
The trembling Esther, as she went, in peril of her life, to 
urge her request, exclaimed, " If I perish, I perish," but 
perished not. The timorous disciples, as they saw the 
waters tempestuous, and the vessel ready to be filled, ex- 
claimed to their Lord, " Master, we perish ;" and he arose 
and spoke, and the waters were calmed, and the disciples 
saved. But if sin be my master, cherished, trusted, and 
idolized, no such peradventure as encouraged Esther remains 
for me. I perish without an alternative, inevitably, and for 
ever. No deliverance like that which rescued the Apostles 



336 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 

will be wrought for me. For if sin be my master, it is a 
master that cannot save. And the God of heaven and earth 
will say to the impenitent sinner as said his servant Peter to 
the sorcerer Simon, " Thy money " — thine idol, be it what 
it may — "perish with thee" Death is on the way, and hell 
following with it ; and if sin rule in us, the ruler and the 
ruled, the master and the servant, the idol and the idolator, 
must sink together into endless perdition. Now by lessons, 
therefore, in the opening leaves of the volume of Providence, 
that enforce and repeat the admonitions of the volume of 
Scripture ; and now by lessons in Scripture that illustrate 
and interpret, in their turn, the visitations of Providence ; 
by the mutual and reflected light of inspiration and calamity, 
the one explaining the other ; by " the rod" and the voice 
of Him "who hath appointed it," as He wields the one and 
utters the other — God is instructing us to renounce our sins. 
He who rules, and who is soon to judge the world, is reiter- 
ating over our land his denunciations against sin, his warn- 
ings against ruin, and his demands of repentance. Repent- 
ance is alike his claim and our duty. Each calamity cries 
aloud, and this is its message. And from the depths of our 
own conscience, in our hours of solitude and serious reflec- 
tion, the summons is re-echoed, " Repent ye." "Or those 
eighteen, upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, and slew 
them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that 
dwelt in Jerusalem ? I tell you, Nay ; but, except yc 
repent, ye shall all likewise perish." 



THE CHURCH, A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 

(A Discourse preached at the Recognition of the Seminary Baptist Church in Hamilton, Madi- 
son Co., N. Y., Thursday Evening, Nov. 13, 1845.) 

" Pastors and teachers ; for the perfecting of the saints, for the 
work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of christ. * * * 

" That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and 
carried about with every wind of doctrine. ******* 

* * " The head, even Christ, from whom the whole body fitly join- 
ed TOGETHER, AND COMPACTED BY THAT WHICH EVERY JOINT SUPPLIETH, AC- 
CORDING TO THE EFFECTUAL WORKING IN THE MEASURE OF EVERY PART, 
MAKETH INCREASE OF THE BODY UNTO THE EDIFYING OF ITSELF IN LOVE." 

Ephes. iv. 11, 12, 14, 15, 16. 

The scene, and the occasion of our assembling at this time, 
both deserve notice. The place where we are gathered is 
known widely in our own land, and in some remote and 
heathen regions, as the site of a school of the prophets, where 
the young men of our churches, called and endowed of God's 
Spirit to the Christian ministry, are trained for their largest 
usefulness. The occasion that calls us together, within these 
quiet scenes of study and prayer, is the public recognition 
of a church of Christ, not confined, indeed, to the inmates 
of this Theological Seminary, but seeking nevertheless their 
especial benefit as one main object of its constitution. There 
are those of us who might not be prepared to counsel the 
formation of a church, limited to one class of society in its 
membership. Believing that its Divine Founder meant that 
his church should embrace his disciples of every age, and of 
either sex, and that it should intermingle all classes of soci- 
ety for their mutual benefit, we should dread the establish- 
ment of a body, that would isolate instead of intermingling 
these various layers of human society, which together make 
up the field of the world. If limited exclusively to theolo- 
gical students, it would include the zeal of youth without the 
ripe experience of age, and receiving the energy of one 
sex would reject the gentleness of the other, and gathering 
the men of letters would have little room for the practical 
sagacity of the men of business ; and thus would the church, 
44 



338 THE CHURCH, 

which, from the genius of the gospel and the design of its 
Author, was to be free as the air and wide as the world in 
its invitations and consolations, be converted into the narrow, 
self-conceited, and exclusive caste. It would again, seek- 
ing its own edification and not the world's conversion, want 
one main element of success, and evade one great errand of 
the church. But it is not, as we suppose, the purpose of those 
who have come together in the new church, thus to circum- 
scribe their membership, and narrow the pale of their fel- 
lowship and duties. But, whilst wishing to admit all else 
who may desire to unite in its services, the well-being of the 
youths who look forward to the Christian ministry will be a 
prominent object. It has been thought, that, during the years 
which our younger brethren spend within these walls, sev- 
ered from the intimacies and removed from the oversight of 
the churches, which received their baptismal vows and en- 
couraged their ministerial aspirations, it was but fitting that 
they should be surrounded, more closely than has heretofore 
been possible, with the privileges and guards of a church 
organization. Much as their esteemed instructors, who fill 
the chairs of instruction in this seminary, may have accom- 
plished, under God, by their public lectures and their private 
influence, it was felt that more was needed. It was evident, 
that the men who were to become the pastors of churches 
should not in the best years of their youth be destitute of 
the privileges and sympathies and disciplinary restraints of a 
church ; or lack entirely all personal and experimental ac- 
quaintance with the practical working of that church polity, 
which as pastors they were hereafter to conduct. It was 
seen, that no school of man's devising could supply the ben- 
efits or supersede the necessity of that school of Christ's 
devising, the Church of the Living God, the organization that 
Infinite Goodness and Infallible Wisdom had framed, for the 
best training of Christ's servants for their work on earth and 
their place in heaven. 

Education is the art of urging and guiding the growth of 
the human mind. It is measured, not merely, or even 
mainly, by the amount of knowledge it brings in, but rather 
by the amount of power that it brings out. It educes the 
hidden energies of the soul, strengthens them, and multiplies 
and facilitates their application to the various tasks of life, 
as the air, the light, the water, and the earth educe the flower 
from the buried seed, and evolve from the acorn the sturdy 



A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 339 

boughs and the massive foliage of the oak. It is one of the 
characteristics of our time, that this duty of the aged to the 
young, this good service due from the generation that rule 
to the generation that shall soon replace them, is awakening 
larger interest ; and its far-reaching results and widely varied 
relations are arousing discussion, and even inflaming contro- 
versy. It is felt, that, in the truest sense of that term, educa- 
tion is not confined to the town-school or the college ; that 
it begins in the cradle with the infant's expanding faculties, 
ere the school has snatched him from the nursery ; and that 
it continues when seminaries and colleges have dismissed their 
pupil, and that it is protracted in the action of society and the 
endeavors of the student, and the influence of these on his 
character and powers, until he enters the grave. And reli- 
gion, showing as it does that this life is but the outcourt of 
eternity, and that the aims and duties of this world can be 
ascertained only by remembering the destinies of another 
world, thus shows that the education of an immortal spirit is 
a work never to pause ; and that the enlargement of his expe- 
rience, and the expansion of his powers, and the development 
of his moral nature, will be, through the long cycles of eter- 
nity, the necessary and the inevitable employment of each 
child of Adam. It is seen, therefore, that other influences 
than those of the school, technically so called, are at work in 
man's education. In Ireland and in France, the mingling of 
the religious element with the tasks of the highest schools 
or colleges of the nation, is at this very time the theme of 
bitter controversy. In England, and in some parts of our 
own Union, the intermingling of the same element with the 
lowest or primary schools of the country, has awakened the 
like eagerness of discussion. It is well that the relations of 
Education and Religion should be discussed. 

The Christian sees, in the church founded by his Redeem- 
er, a school of higher endowments and loftier aims than the 
best appointed universities of the nations. Even the Theo- 
logical Seminary, religious as are its instructions, and spir- 
itual as is its influence, it is found, cannot supply the place of 
the Master's own simple, sublime organization, the Christian 
Church, with its ordinances and discipline, its intermingling 
of sympathies and ks mutual duties. The testimony given on 
this spot, and by these present services, to the unrivalled and 
indispensable blessings of the Christian church, leads us nat- 
urally to the selection of our theme. The topic of those 



340 THE CHURCH, 

remarks, to which we ask your patient and devout attention, is, 
the Christian Church, a School for Heaven. And may 
the Spirit of all truth, promised by our Saviour as the Com- 
forter and Guide of His people, be invoked and received by 
all here met. May His living Light and ineffable Might 
unfold to us the lessons, and burn in upon our hearts the prin- 
ciples of that gospel which He alone indited, which He alone 
effectually interprets, and which it is or soon will be the 
business of so many here to proclaim. Soon to be scattered, 
perhaps, through many nations, but bearing every where one 
message ; soon to be gathered to remote graves, but dying 
every where we trust in one confession, and finding eveiy 
where one God, witnessing every where of one cross, and 
summoning to one throne, let us meditate on the character 
and blessings of that one spiritual church which we should 
seek every where to plant and to defend, because it is the 
one Church which the World's one Redeemer and Judge, 
as we understand His word, devised for the men of all 
climes and the men of all times. 

It is one of the distinctions between the works of God and 
the handiwork of man, that the workmanship of human skill 
is unable to bear close scrutiny or the stress of long use. It 
is soon worn out, and on one side or other, by minute and 
varied examination, is found imperfect, awkward, unfinished 
or defective. But the fabrics of the Divine Hand are found 
more perfect, the more varied the aspects in which they 
are viewed, the more closely they are scanned, and the more 
thoroughly they are tried. It is so with the Church. Human 
societies, and governments, and philosophies, are found in- 
efficient for the new emergencies and the enlarged experi- 
ences of society. But the Church, as God framed it, perpet- 
uates itself, containing the elements of its own repair and 
permanence ; and, built upon Christ the Rock of Ages, and 
endowed with the graces of that Divine Spirit, who is the 
treasury of all wisdom and might, it goes down in the hands 
of prayerful and faithful men, adequate to meet the conflicts 
of every age, and the requirements of all forms and condi- 
tions of society. Leave it but as Christ left it, and it bears 
transplantation to tho frozen North or the burning South, 
thrives under the sides of the despot's throne, or in the soil 
of a republic, and adapts itself to all grades of human culture, 
from the races — forlorn, fetid, and loathsome — that seem on 
the verge of bare brutalism, up to those, which, refined, ele- 



A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 341 

vated and intoxicated by successive centuries of civilization, 
are ready with Herod to deem themselves gods upon earth. 
The Church is described in the Scriptures by various 
imagery, that we may contemplate its adaptations and pur- 
poses on various sides. It is called now the husbandry, now 
the building, here the house and there the temple of God, 
implying His continued activity upon it, and His presence 
within it. Now, by metaphors derived from another walk of 
society, it is called the flock and fold of Christ, of which 
he is the chief Shepherd, implying its dependent weakness 
and His directing care. Now it is His bride, ransomed by 
his death, adorned with the jewels of his glory, and sharing 
his royalty. This is the metaphor not only of the New 
Testament, but of the Old in some of the Psa'ms and in the 
book of Canticles — Psalms quoted and indorsed, in that inter- 
pretation of them, by the Holy Ghost in the epistle to the 
Hebrews. And as marriage in the eyes of the old common 
law makes those it has united one person, and in the lan- 
guage of Scripture they are one body, there is no violent 
transition from this last metaphor to another, which makes 
the Church the Body of Christ. This last is the reigning 
imagery of the context, in that portion of the epistle to the 
Ephesians, from which our text is taken. In Paul's first 
epistle to the Corinthian disciples, the same illustration is 
followed, at yet greater length. In our text the apostle 
blends the similitude of a body of which Christ is the head, 
with the imagery of a school having " teachers " some of 
whose pupils remain but " children" or novices, when 
they should have grown up to adult proficiency, or as he 
elsewhere phrases it, " babes inChrist" needing to be taught 
again the first and elementary principles of the faith ; or as 
he here continues the illustration, in danger of being " car- 
ried away with every wind of doctrine ," the storms of every 
new and popular teaching, however novel, unauthenticated 
and contradictory such teachings may be — winds to which 
the immature Christian gives too easy heed, however oppo- 
site the points from which they blow, and however awful the 
gulfs into which they would hurl him. To have brought for- 
ward the whole unbroken context, would involve a wider 
range of discussion than may be admissible. We have 
selected those portions of the context, which bear most 
directly on the church in its aspect of a school, representing 



342 THE CHURCH, 

the members of the Christian Church as learners, who should 
go on to maturity and perfection. 

The Christian Church, as a school, is an image familiar to 
the New Testament. Christ Himself had called His follow- 
ers, disciples or scholars. The multitude who did not become 
such learners, yet admired the Lord in His character of an 
Instructor, who taught, to use their language, is one having 
authority. He invited the weary to " learn of Him," and 
urged men to test His "doctrine," whether it were not of 
the Father. And on quitting the earth, he left it in charge of 
His churches to disciple all nations, or to call all mankind 
into His school. In the times of the apostles, the ministry 
are often described as " the teachers" of their brethren, 
and Paul makes it a qualification for the office that a man 
be apt to teach. The private member he elsewhere de- 
scribes as " him that is taught," and enjoins it upon him to 
communicate of his substance " unto him that teacheth." It 
may be said that in his letter to the Galatians the same 
apostle declares that we are " no more under a schoolmas- 
ter,'' but an examination of the context shows him to be re- 
buking the Jews for clinging to the law as yet their instruc- 
tor, when that schoolmaster had already brought and trans- 
ferred them to the higher form, and to the loftier guidance 
of Christ, as John the Baptist sent his disciples to the Sa- 
viour. In saying that the church had no more a schoolmas- 
ter, Christ was certainly excepted, just as elsewhere when 
the Saviour himself forbade his people to call any man Rabbi 
or Master, he yet included not Himself in the prohibition, 
declaring " that one was their Master," and that Himself 
was such Master and Lord. The Church, then, is a school. 
It trains in truth and in holiness. It trains for eternity, 
for Heaven and God. Elsewhere, and quite as frequently, 
the Church is designated as a family, all named from their 
one Elder Brother ; and still more frequently, perhaps, as 
a kingdom, all governed by one law, and one sovereign ; 
and moving onward to an assured conquest and a com- 
mon throne. So it is a host, and Christ is the Captain of its 
salvation. The school, as we have said, is but one therefore 
of the many sides, on which the Scriptures view that great 
scheme of Divine Wisdom and Love, the Church of the Lord 
Jesus Christ. It is that side of this spiritual structure, to 
the contemplation of which, the spot where we stand, and the 
occasion that has assembled us, most naturally invite us. 



A. SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 343 

As such, let us reverently and prayerfully, since every school 
has its instructors, its manuals and pupils, inquire, 

I. Who are the Teachers in this, the School of Heaven ? 

II. What the manuals, which they employ ? 

III. And, lastly, who are the learners ? 

The instructors, the text-books, and the pupils, form, then, 
the three divisions under which our remarks will be grouped. 

I. The Church, is a term used in the New Testament in 
two varying senses, to describe an invisible and a visible 
body. So its teachers are of two classes, the invisible and 
the visible. It has its Divine and its human instructors. We 
said the word Church in the language of inspiration has two 
meanings. It is applied to describe the general assembly 
of all saints, those who were once, and those who are, and 
those who are yet to be on the earth, as all now foreseen, 
or hereafter met and made perfect in heaven. This is the 
general assembly and church of the First-born, and from the 
very necessity of our condition, is therefore to the inhabit- 
ants of the earth an invisible church. This church excludes 
what every earthly and visible church probably includes, 
errorists, who hold not the Head, formalists and hypocrites. 
It is composed of the elect, and the elect alone. The word 
Church is used in another and more limited sense of the 
visible assembly of saints, real or supposed, that holding 
the truth, meet for worship in one place. This is the visi- 
ble church of the Bible, and is from its nature a single con- 
gregation. The theologians have invented and made cur- 
rent another and intermediate use of the word, a national 
visible church, which they describe, as made up of several 
hundred congregations, or even of the entire nation. For 
this the Holy Ghost gives no warrant ; and yet on this 
unwarranted assumption rest many of the claims of prelacy 
and the papacy. The New Testament speaks not of the 
church of Asia, or the church of Judea, as this theory would 
have required it to do ; but of the seven churches of 
Asia and the churches in Judea, showing that the visible 
church of the New Testament is a single congregation. 
Each such congregation, by the concurrent testimony of the 
New Testament and primitive antiquity, is independent of its 
sister churches. Yet each such visible church, far as it dis- 
penses essentially the same truth, and enjoys the same Sa- 
viour's presence and the same Spirit's influences, is a section 
of the great Catholic Invisible Church ; and is truly apostolic, 



344 THE CHURCH, 

for it has union with the apostles now before the throne ; 
and is truly Catholic, for it is one in spirit, testimony and 
heritage with the godly of all dispensations and all ages. As 
the church organization is then, in one aspect, a visible body, 
and in another of its aspects and relations, part and parcel 
of what is as yet to man an invisible body, seen and read 
only of God ; we need not wonder to find that it has its two 
classes of teachers, the seen and the unseen ; answering to the 
two worlds which it unites, to that visible and material earth 
where it is, in its sections, for the time planted, and to those 
invisible heavens, whither it is finally to be transplanted, in 
its entirety, and to find its better and eternal home, melting 
there all its distinct congregations into the general assembly 
and church of the First-born. 

1. God is, then, the great and effectual Teacher, invisibly, 
of this school of saints. He is the Unseen Instructor of the 
Church. It was promised even under the old dispensation, 
" All thy children shall be taught of God."* Each person 
in the adorable Trinity co-operates in this work of spiritual 
education. By a peculiarity which lifts this school above 
all those of human origin and endowment, its true and effec- 
tual learners are all changed in heart ; a lesson is set them, so 
wondrous and energetic, that they are by it renewed as to the 
spirit of their minds. The Bible describes this, the great 
crisis in the science of salvation, as a new birth, the com- 
mencement of a higher stage and a worthier mode of spiritual 
existence. The share of the Father in this work we learn 
from the lips of His Son. " No man cometh unto me, 
except the Father which hath sent me draw him."t Why 
some are thus drawn and others are not drawn, who may say ? 
Exercising over our world a righteous sovereignty, of which 
the history of the world and of the church alike attest the 
reality, but of which the united wisdom of the world and 
the church would alike fail to fathom all the mystery, the 
Father makes some his, by adopting grace, and passes over 
others. The general call, the imperative summons, and the 
gracious invitations and expostulations of his gospel, are hon- 
estly addressed to all ; but he makes them to become an 
effectual calling, only in the case of His own elect. As to the 
iSon's share in this instruction, the work of Christ in this 
teaching is spread over every page, almost, of the New Tes- 

* Isaiah liv. 13. t John vi. 44. 



A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 345 

tament. In the context before us, he is made the Head from 
which the entire body depends. Elsewhere he is said to be 
formed in the hearts of the regenerate, as the hope of glory. 
They are the sheep that hear his voice. All who come to 
the Father come by Him, and none know that Father but 
as that Son reveals Him. Present, to the end of the world, 
in the humblest assemblies of His people, and aiding the 
stammering lips of the feeblest of his true ministers, this, 
His pledged presence, is the secret of their indefectibility. 
And, as in the days of Paul's youth he sat at Gamaliel's feet, 
and as in the days of Christ's flesh Mary sat at that Saviour's 
feet, so must, now and forever, every true learner in the 
school of Heaven sit at the feet of Jesus the Great Teacher, 
and learn of Him. But it is to the Holy Ghost that especial 
prominence is given by the New Testament, as the great 
Invisible Teacher and Comforter of the church, He opens 
the sealed eyes and unstops the ears long closed. He takes 
the stores of wisdom that are of the Father and of the Son, 
and shows them unto us. By Him we pray acceptably, and 
in His light see the light of the Scriptures. He not only 
renews and sanctifies each private member of the church, but 
His alone it is to call, and endow, and prosper the pastors or 
human and visible teachers of the Church. Christ gave this 
Spirit, in all his varying and inexhaustible influences, as the 
accompaniment and attestation of His own kingly ascension, 
when he quitted the earth to regain his native skies, and 
to resume the glory which He had for the time relinquished. 
To sin wilfully against this great Invisible but indispensa- 
ble Agent, is the unpardonable sin for which there is no remis- 
sion. ' Grieve Him not,' ' Quench not His kindled influ- 
ences,' is the loud and solemn warning of Christ and Christ's 
apostles to the churches. Forgetfulness of His rights and of 
His incommunicable prerogatives is the secret of declension, 
heresy, and wide-spread ruin, to the churches of earth in 
every age. As the glorious reformation was traceable to a 
restoration of Christ to his rightful place as the Mediator 
and the Righteousness of the church ; so we suppose, that the 
melancholy pause and reaction which was seen in the progress 
of that reformation, was traceable to a neglect on the part of 
the Churches, to give to the Holy Ghost his due place and 
honors in the system of Christianity. Men trusted in the 
truth, apart from Him, the Spirit of Truth. They relied on 
the graves of their reformed Fathers instead of the everlast- 



346 THE CHURCH, 

ing God of those Fathers ; on controversies and in creeds, 
dissevered from prayer for the influences of the Paraclete. 
The effect was that the chariot of salvation faltered in its 
course, and its wheels drave heavily, and the banners of 
Antichrist turned again from their earlier flight, and flouted 
anew the standards of a purer faith ; and Christian Europe 
saw itself like the victim on one of whose sides palsy has 
laid its blight ; the half had sense and life, and half struggled 
with the torpor of death. 

The great mission of our own denomination, as distin- 
guished from other sections of true Christians, is, not only to 
proclaim, with them, the need of personal and individual re- 
generation by this blessed Spirit, but also to discriminate 
the effectual Spirit from the emblematic rite, and to isolate 
the individual, — apart from the nation, and apart from the 
family, — shutting him up, singly and alone, to the need, for 
himself, personally and apart from all hope in his fellows, 
of this regenerating Spirit, for himself individually. When 
Christians, (even wise, and good, and great men,) in the old 
world, confound the Church and the State ; when, as we 
suppose, Christians in the New World, of undisputed ex- 
cellence and wisdom, are yet chargeable with the error of 
confounding the Church and the household, thus bringing in 
the carnal and unregenerate element into the constitution of 
a church that should be exclusively spiritual and all regen- 
erate, it is our duty to declare that the influences of this 
great Invisible Teacher are riot transmissible, as a material 
hereditament, by mere right of descent. Our peculiar voca- 
tion it is to call each to look to himself, and that he say not, 
as did the Jews in the times of Christ's forerunner : We are 
the seed of the spiritual, " We have Abraham to our father ;" 
as if it followed thence, by an inevitable sequence, that they 
had the spirit of adoption, and could legitimately cry to Je- 
hovah : « Abba, Father.' 

And if ever, which may God forbid, the inscription of 
Ichabod, the memorial of departed power and of vanished 
glory, the mournful sentence that has been inscribed on many 
a Theological Seminary in Europe and on some in America, — 
Seminaries, that, reared in faith, have passed over into the 
hands of formalism and heresy — if that dread and desolating 
inscription be ever legible on these walls, reared by the sac- 
rifices, and fragrant with the prayers of men who revered and 
adored the Holy Ghost, it will be, probably, by a wrong done 



A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 347 

to this Divine Teacher, that the work of desecration will have 
been begun : — the neglect of the Paraclete will be the abomin- 
ation that maketh desolate. If, against the examples, and the 
entreaties, and the instructions of your pious teachers, young 
men of this Seminary, the hope and joy of the Churches — let 
a dying sinner say to his fellow-heirs of mortality and of 
sin — if you substitute learning for spirituality, and a reli- 
ance on intellect for trust in the Divine Teacher, and prefer 
speculation to prayer, it is against this, the pre-eminent and 
Supreme Teacher of the Church, that you will be sinning. 
And the city of Mansoul, as Bunyan depicts it, beleaguered 
in all her gates, and with treason busy on her walls and in her 
citadel, while this, the Lord Secretary, alienated by neglect, 
has withdrawn himself in disgust from an oblivious and un- 
grateful people, — Mansoul, we say, besieged and disheart- 
ened, famished and terrified, and deserted of her Lord, will 
becorne but the feeble image of the Churches to which you 
may minister, with the stores of an unsanctified learning, and 
of a godless and self-deifying intellect. 

2. Subordinate to this Divine Teaching, and valueless 
without it, there come, next, the human teachers, the ushers 
under the great and paramount Teacher, God. They are 
described in our text and the adjoining sentences. Some of 
these human teachers were of an extraordinary and miracu- 
lous character, given to apostolic times, but not continued 
in later ages of the Church. Of this kind, are the three first 
named by the apostle, among these visible and mortal teachers 
of Christ's school : apostles, prophets, and evangelists. By 
the last was probably intended a class of men like Timothy 
and Titus, who might best be described by a name which 
Rome has used for other purposes, as apostolical vicars, act- 
ing in an apostle's stead, under his directions, and as we sup- 
pose, only during his life-time. Thus Titus traversed Crete 
and ordered its churches with a delegated share of Paul's 
power. The name, evangelist, is now often given to breth- 
ren in the ministry confined to no pastoral charge, and who 
are devoted mainly to labors, for the revival of the churches 
and for the conversion of sinners, over a wide district. We 
would neither deny nor disparage the eminent usefulness 
and graces of some men like Whitfield and the Wesleys 
and the Tennents, who have been thus employed. We 
believe that the churches need true revivals, and should 
pray for them and seek them, and finding them from God, 



348 THE CHURCH, 

may then well multiply and protract their religious services. 
But, that this text recognizes and describes, here, preachers 
devoted mainly to such efforts, as to their one work, as the 
class it intends by the term evangelists, we doubt. Far as 
such laborers for God rebuke the apathy of Christian churches 
and Christian ministers, and turn many to righteousness, we 
would rejoice in their success and emulate their graces. 
But far as such examples, on the other hand, are pleaded 
as authority, and they have unhappily been so pleaded, for 
measures more mechanical than spiritual, and for modes of 
worship rather dramatic than devotional ; far as periodical 
excitements have been made to discredit and replace God's 
Sabbaths and the appointed and permanent preaching of 
the word ; and far as, intentionally, there have been efforts 
to break down the pastoral authority, to substitute for it, a 
virtual control and supervision by a higher class of laborers, 
who should themselves be bound to no spot, and responsible 
to no church, we believe the pleas so made unwarranted, and 
the results, as the churches have already proved, may be 
abundantly disastrous. The church is, in one of its great 
uses, as a nursery and school for the children of God. It is 
dangerous to convert it, by our hot haste, into a Foundling 
Hospital, crowded with those of dubious or spurious parent- 
age. The inmates of such receptacles in Europe are known 
to die, the larger mass of them, before reaching maturity. 
And as the Foundling Hospitals of the old world have not 
been proved to favor either the population or public morals 
of a land ; so the rapid and indiscriminate admissions to 
church membership advocated by some indiscreet laborers, — 
the receiving as God's children those who give scanty evi- 
dence of His adoption, — the letting in upon God's heritage 
of an alien seed, — the giving, as Christ said, the children's 
bread to dogs, — has not wrought happily on the purity or 
prosperity of our churches. And how fatal must be its effect 
on those thus baptized into an unregenerate hope, and who, 
if they but maintain an ordinary morality, burden our church- 
es as formalists or errorists — or who, if casting off moral re- 
straints, they incur exclusion, generally harden into infidels 
and mockers. Let us not decry protracted meetings : let us 
not unduly rely on their aid. Let us not crowd all our de- 
votion into six weeks or seven of the fifty-two that make up 
the year, more than the merchant would crowd all his hon- 
esty into one month of the twelve. Let us give due honor 



A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 349 

to brethren, to whom God may have given special endow- 
ments for awakening the impenitent and backslidden. But 
let us not claim the support of this text for these as if they* 
were the extraordinary evangelists of apostolic times, tra- 
versing the land with a divine commission, to set up, at their 
pleasure, or to put down pastors. But let us cling tena- 
ciously to God's mechanism for the world's conversion and 
for the sanctification of the Church, the ordinary ministry 
and the pastorate ; and let us expect a harvest-time for 
souls running through all the Sabbaths of the year. Let us 
recollect that, in all communions, we are in danger from 
the error, which so beguiled and enlarged Rome. She, to 
make religion popular, and conversions rapid and multitu- 
dinous, hewed the strait gate wider, and made the narrow 
way broad as the path to death. Thus has she, under pre- 
tence of evangelizing the nations, carnalized the gospel and 
secularized the church. Instead of converting the nations, 
this is but a conversion of the gospel to something other 
and more and worse than what Christ left it. 

Of the details of the pastor's duty we have not now time 
to speak. God has all varieties of gifts in these his ministers. 
There are some whose minds are formed for patient inquiry, 
and others for impressive statement and irresistible appeal. 
One man shows his strength in his prayers, and another in his 
sermons, and yet another in his pastoral visits. There are 
some whose doctrine distils like the gathering dew, softly 
and almost imperceptibly bathing the mind of a hearer. Oth- 
ers have a gentle profusion of sentiment and language, that 
like the speech of old Nestor, as Homer describes it, falls 
as the snow, and covers all with its light, feathery flakes. 
And there are still others, whose words, slow, ponderous, and 
compact with compressed meaning, fall like the hail-storm 
mentioned in the Apocalyptic vision, where each stone was of 
a talent's weight, and crushed when it struck. A dull uni- 
formity in the gifts of the pastorate, would not conduce to gen- 
eral edification ; and the attempt, sometimes apparent, to 
make any individual teacher the standard, to whose personal 
endowments every other must be conformed, or suffer re- 
jection, is an attempt to mend God's better methods of using 
all and all varieties of gifts in his school. Peter could nei- 
ther speak, write, nor act like John ; and John was incapable 
of assuming the tone and port of Peter ; and neither could 
dilate, with the broad magnificence, or dive into the deep 



350 THE CHURCH, 

mysteries of truth, with the unfathomed profundity of Paul : 
yet Paul, and Peter, and John were all servants of the same 
Christ, organs and channels of the same Holy Spirit, and effi- 
cient servants of the same Church of the Living God. Let 
pastor and student, while shunning all needless eccentricity, 
cultivate and develope fearlessly their own individuality, and 
occupy the talents, few or many, given to their especial 
keeping. It is the duty of the pastor to look to himself and 
his ministry ; to study, that he may teach; to pray much, 
that he may have much of the Spirit's influences ; and to vary 
his appeals, warnings, and instructions to the varying charac- 
acter, and needs, and state of the souls entrusted to his charge. 

3. Again, the Church, collectively, is in a certain sense 
to teach. All Christians bear, in their measure, part in the 
human instructions, due from the Church. In this school 
they are to.be living epistles of Christ, seen and read of all 
men. They are to hold forth the word of life. The Church 
is to grow, as our context shows, by that which " every 
joint supplieth." When there is a failure on the part of the 
several members of this church to feel and meet this obliga- 
tion, we see the apostle's command to the churches practi- 
cally read, by a melancholy travesty, as if the body of Christ, 
his Church, were to be, instead of compacted, " dislocated by 
that which every joint w ithholdeth, according to the inefficient 
working, in the measure of every part, and maketh waste of 
the body, unto the destruction of itself, in general uncharita- 
bleness, and a reigning selfishness." Such churches pine un- 
der an atrophy of Christian graces and a palsy of all spiritual 
activity. In every station and of either sex, true Christians 
may in their appropriate sphere witness for Christ. Thus 
even in the sex to which Paul forbade public teaching in the 
church, he commands that in the seclusion of the home and 
in the associations of the domestic circle, the aged women 
be " teachers of good things." 

Thus have we observed how the divine and the human, the 
visible and the invisible, combine as the appointed teachers 
of the Church as it is God's school : the mortal usher seen, 
but the Great Master by whom and for whom he works, un- 
seen. 

II. Let us now pass, in the second place, to the manuals, 
which this school uses, the text-books out of which the lessons 
are to be furnished. They are all volumes of God's inditing, 
the first and the last marred by the share of man in their 



A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 351 

transcription ; the second is the only volume to which strictly 
belongs the title of a revelation. 

1. The book of man's conscience, is, perhaps, the first to be 
named. When describing the work of the great Invisible 
Teacher of the Church, the blessed Spirit of God, the Saviour 
represents Him, as unrolling this volume. He convinces, or 
makes to be read in the inner conscience the guilt of those he 
teaches ; convicting the world first of sin, bringing home to 
the human spirit the sense of its guilt, and haunting it with 
the memory of its long-buried trespasses. So the apostle, 
describing the heathen who enters the Christian assembly to 
meet God there, represents him as having the secrets of his 
heart made manifest, and then falling down with the confes- 
sion that God is indeed in the midst of the church. So Sol- 
omon, in the ancient dispensation, calls the acceptable sup- 
pliant of God's courts the man who knows the plague of his 
own heart. So Paul depicts the faithful preacher of the 
gospel, as commending himself to every man's conscience in 
the sight of God. This is one of the books that will be open- 
ed in the day of judgment: and it is, even now, the business of 
the human teacher of the church, instrument ally, and the 
prerogative of the Divine Teacher of the church, effectually, 
to turn the leaves of this dread text-book, and show to men 
what they are and what they need, the guilt they have in- 
curred and the mercy they require. So the Christian is to 
try his heart and way, keeping with all diligence that heart 
out of which are the issues of the life, and whence, in the 
case of the renewed man, springs a well of water unto life 
everlasting. 

2. The second is the volume of God's Scriptures. Where 
is this revelation of God to be found 1 Is it within the lids 
of the volume of the written word; or in the depths of the 
human intellect, which in the first writers originated that 
word, and in each of its readers, is to try that word ; or is 
it in the traditions of the Church, at whose hands we are to 
take this word, and from whose lips tojiave it interpreted 
and amplified? For our churches, and the evangelical sects 
of Protestantism, there is no hesitation, in choosing the pro- 
per definition, and the true seat of Revelation. To us the 
Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are the ultimate 
and complete revelation of God. Before the canon of the 
New Testament was finished, and whilst apostles, having 
plenary inspiration, yet guided the Church, their teachings 



352 THE CHURCH, 

orally had, with the Christian disciples, the authority now 
due to their written testimonies. The revelation of that age 
was in their lips. Their writings gathered and fixed revela- 
tion ; and gave it a local habitation in the Bible. Just, as 
philosophers tell us, as the light existed before the creation of 
the sun, floating in irregular masses ; so was it with revela- 
tion in the first century. Until apostles, by their writings, 
compiled, and by their death closed the canon of the New 
Testament, this, the light of Heaven for the human soul, 
was floating in the oral instructions of the teachers, and in 
the memories of their converts. The formation of the New 
Testament, and the departure of inspired apostles, gathered, 
and fixed, and limited Divine Revelation, in an embodiment, 
from which, now, nothing may be taken, and to which no- 
thing may be added. 

To this book, however, exception is taken, from opposite 
quarters. The votaries of tradition represent the volume as 
incomplete, needing theit traditions, as its appendix and its 
exposition. The disciples of rationalism regard it as inexact, 
and needing to be corrected and amended, by the better 
judgment of each reader, and the rising lights of each new 
and wiser generation. Widely, then, as these two opposing 
errors diverge from each other, they yet converge together, 
in the one principle, that Scripture is defective. Our church- 
es deny all such alleged defect, and recognize, in the Book, 
a type of the Wisdom of its Author, as a record omitting 
nought that is needful for its purposes, and retaining 
nought that is needless. We recognize the rights of human 
reason, in its own legitimate sphere, and within the narrow 
scope of its feeble powers, to examine, with patient thorough- 
ness, all the evidences of the Divine origin of the document, 
and carefully to settle the exact text of the document ; but, 
these done, it is bound meekly to receive much that may be 
mysterious, believing that what God has said, is and must 
be true, and that the weakness of God is stronger than man, 
and the foolishness of God wiser than man. 

The God, who educes good out of evil, may, we believe, 
bring to his Church profit and edification, even out of the 
results of the most lawless rationalism, as exhibited in those 
German scholars, who seem to graft a Sadducean temerity, 
as to the doctrines of the Bible, upon a Pharisaic precise- 
ness, as to the text of the Bible. The churches may be 
called to bless God, for the siftings to which German Neol- 



A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 353 

ogy has subjected the text of the New Testament, as they 
do for the bigoted strictness of the ancient Pharisee, as to 
the text of the Old Testament : and yet our churches may 
as little sympathize with the principles of the German exe- 
gete as with those of the ancient Scribes. 

As to the attempt to make tradition an indispensable sup- 
plement to Scripture, and to prove that Revelation is to be 
compiled, and a system of religious truth selected, out of 
the Fathers, Councils and Decretals, it seems to us, on its 
face, as absurd, as would be the proposal, that we should 
set ourselves to compile and complete the Paradise Lost of 
Milton, a book of the seventeenth century, out of the news- 
papers and general literature of the nineteenth century. We 
might better content ourselves with the copy as it stands, in 
its original integrity. If we are to go out of it, we may find 
in the floating sheets of our time, all the words of Milton's 
poem, covered by myriads of other words, and destitute of 
all order and cohesion. But the task of disentanglino;, iden- 
tifying and arranging these " scattered members " of the 
poet, would involve a toil quite as difficult for our incompe- 
tency as the writing of a new and rival Paradise Lost. And 
so, in the traditions of the Church, and the teachings of the 
Fathers, tortuous, and contradictory, and confused as they 
are, Inspiration and Omniscience would be quite as much 
needed to disentangle truth from error, as to write any gos- 
pel or epistle in all the New Testament. The inspired se- 
lection of the true tradition would need, too, as much mira- 
culous evidence to warrant the claim, as was vouchsafed to 
the inspired dictation of the canonical Scriptures. 

But it is said, by the advocates of Patristic lore ; you do 
not know the canonical Scriptures, except by the testimony 
of the early fathers ; and if they, it is, who give you the 
Testament, you are bound to take with it their interpreta- 
tion. We do not admit this. The early Christians are but 
as the postman, who brings to us a letter from some friend, 
the resident of a distant city. The epistle is authenticated, 
in part indeed, by the postmark and the carrier. But, be- 
sides and above the evidence thus supplied, the letter itself, 
and its contents, as tallving with the known character and 
earlier correspondence of our distant friend, are evidences 
also : and if these last be wanting, the others would be un- 
availing. In his place the carrier does good service, and 
bears availing testimony : but if, because he is the postman, 

46 



354 THE CHURCH, 

he claims to open for us, and to interpret to us, the epistle 
he brings, he grossly exaggerates his own prerogatives. 
Even so is it with the early churches. As the bearers, in 
Divine Providence, to us of our Father's letters missive, they 
may legitimately testify to certain facts within their know- 
ledge, that certain compositions were written by apostles 
and apostolic men whom the apostles explicitly authorized 
thereto. This is a fact of history. They are the masters 
of the post where the letter was mailed, and their mark 
fixes its origin at such place and at such date. But there 
are other historical witnesses besides them. The very oppo- 
nents of the gospel, in earlier ages, give similar testimony. 
Julian the apostate is himself, then, one of the postmen. 
But, even traditionists would not contend that he is there- 
fore an interpreter of the document, which he aids in authen- 
ticating and forwarding. 

But are we told, by the men of reason, on the other hand, 
that, if we admit man's intellect to sit in judgment on the 
historical and other evidences of the Divine origin of the 
document, and on the just letter and text of the document, 
then, we must, of necessity, hold that intellect competent to 
judge the substance, as well as the text of the document, 
and to alter and amend this, to the requirements of the cul- 
tivated reason ? We answer : the claim, though urged by 
those who call themselves rationalists, seems the embodi- 
ment of all that is irrational, as well as irreverent. If-rea- 
son can thus make and remake a revelation, it certainly does 
not need one : if, confessedly, it needs one, then it cannot 
make one. The principle of such an exegesis is, that we 
first reason out by our own native powers, a system of doc- 
trine or morals, and that we then hew and crush God's 
scripture into harmony with this our preconceived standard. 
If this system leaves Scripture any place, it is that of being 
the stuttering interpreter of Reason, by an enunciation, 
awkward, quaint, and obscure, bringing out what Reason 
herself states more clearly, more systematically, and more 
forcibly. The Bible is, then, a Moses, of stammering lips : 
whilst Reason is the Aaron, the eloquent speaker. On this 
principle, Revelation is seen, stumbling on crutches; whilst 
Reason moves before it, like some parent bird before its un- 
fledged offspring, poised on airy wings. The Bible, and 
Conscience, and man's own honest, and unintoxicated Rea- 
son, coincide in reversing this imaginary relation ; and as- 



A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 355 

cribe the real ownership of the crutches to Reason, and of 
the wings to Revelation. 

Instead of being outgrown, as some intimate, by the grow- 
ing civilization of the race, the Scriptures, with the infinite 
wisdom they derive from their Divine Author, are found, 
age after age, developing still new glories with each deeper 
investigation. No past age has exhausted all the lodes and 
veins of truth these mines contain. The gospel is as inex- 
haustible, as man's wants, and life's changes, and God's 
grace. Until the breathing of these troops of students shall 
have stript these hills of their keen and bracing air, — until 
the lungs of the race shall have exhausted the atmosphere 
of our globe, — until your thirst shall have drained the seas, 
and your eyes have beggared sun and stars of all their light, 
you need not fear, brethren in the Christian ministry, that 
your studies and your sermons will have drawn dry the 
fountain of God's oracles. The only concern we need to 
feel is, that, as in Jonathan Edwards, and Andrew Fuller, 
and Henry Martyn, study and piety should keep pace ; and 
that the results of our profoundest thinking should be used 
to feed the flames of a seraphic devotion ; and that, like the 
warrior psalmist of Israel, vigor and valor in the outer battle- 
field of the world, should never be regarded as a dispensa- 
tion from lowly and lonely adoration, within the curtains of 
the tabernacle. 

A portion of this book of Revelation is prophetic. It 
limns, with more or less of distinctness, the shape of the 
times that are to pass over the churches and the nations. 
"If (said the apostle to Timothy) thou put the brethren in 
remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister 
of Jesus Christ " (1 Tim. iv. 6). Look to the context of 
that saying, and it is found that these things, thus commended 
as the theme of pastoral admonition, are the difficult, con- 
troverted and mysterious lessons of prophecy ; but practical, 
in all their mystery, for they forewarn of an impending, 
gradual and general apostasy, and this as growing, in part, 
out of a practical mistake, false views of Christian holiness. 
Prophecy had bidden the churches discern the gatherings of 
that cloud, which burst in a storm of delusion upon Chris- 
tendom, and continued for successive centuries. We do not 
say that prophecy is to be the one staple of the pulpit, that 
it is to be the exclusive, or even the paramount subject of 
study to the churches. The milk which befits the babes in 



356 THE CHURCH, 

Christian grace, and the simple bread for which the poor of 
the Lord hunger, are not to be sought, mainly, in gauging 
the apocalyptic vials. Sinai, and the Mount of Beatitudes, 
and Calvary, have their right to be heeded, as well as those 
dread blasts which issue from the trumpets of the apocalyptic 
vision. But, on the other hand, what God thought it neces- 
sary to write, the Church may not safely think it unnecessary 
to read : and whilst it is our folly to be wise above what is 
written, it is our privilege to be wise up to what God has so 
written. Do we shrink from controversy ? It is often in- 
evitable, to pass safely the ordeal of some popular error. 
Does prophecy, as a study, seem wanting in practical uses ? 
Certainly, in the text already indicated from Paul's letters 
to his son in the faith, the essence of Christian practice, the 
true nature of holiness, is represented in the prophecy, as 
being widely mistaken within the nominal Church. Without 
pondering this, and similar predictions, we are not sure that 
we set out, with just principles, in our elementary views of 
Christian graces, and of practical holiness. And, on the 
other hand, the prophetic portions of the Bible were, in the 
hands of the early reformers, most potent weapons, of daily 
use, against Rome. It is a remarkable and significant fact 
of our times, that whilst Rome, as in dread of their power, 
has sought to turn from herself the evangelical descriptions 
of Antichrist which the reformers quoted against her, there 
should be, at two remote points, having little intercourse or 
sympathy, the Oxford Tractarians of Britain, on the one. 
side, and some esteemed expositors of our own land, on the 
other, a disposition to pass to the Romanist system of inter- 
pretation, thus surrendering an outwork held, both long be- 
fore and long after the Reformation, by those who have wit- 
nessed against that apostate Church. A return to the views 
of our fathers, is, in this matter, we believe, demanded by 
the harmony of Scripture, and indispensable to the triumphs 
of the Gospel. With them, we must hold Pontifical Rome 
to be the mystical Babylon of the New Testament. As 
Babylon of the Chaldees held Israel captive by the Euphra- 
tes, so has this fallen Church, beside the streams of her 
Tiber, wielded a more cruel tyranny, over a wider region, 
and for a far longer term. Prophetic exposition, as one of 
the weapons of the Reformation against her, has not yet 
lost its temper, and may not be spared from the armory of 
the soldiers of truth. 



A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 357 

Scripture, then, in its fulness and its sufficiency — in its 
morals, and its mysteries, and its prophecies also, must be, 
and remain, the chief text-book and manual, in the School, 
where God trains the children of Adam for the employments 
and associations of Heaven. 

3. But besides the manuals of man's conscience and God's 
Scriptures, there is another book to be studied in the church. 
The third is the volume of God's providence. God is ruling 
the world. His dealings are full of instruction. " Whoso 
is wise," said the Psalmist, " and will observe these things, 
even they shall understand the loving-kindness of the Lord."* 
That portion of the volume of Scripture to which we have" 
last alluded, and which contains God's prophecies of the fu- 
ture, is to be interpreted by collation with this other and cor- 
responding volume of His providence. This forms the chief 
value of Church History. It illustrates the reasonableness 
and justice of the warnings of inspired men, the value of 
their doctrines to holiness, and shows the effect of all at- 
tempts to improve their doctrines by a higher sanctity, to be 
eventually the fostering of unholiness. It shows impressive- 
ly the unity of the Divine Spirit, and of the Saviour's image, 
in true Christians of all ages and all communions. One 
great excellence of the labors of the devout and eminent 
Neander, is the mode in which he thus analyzes and recog- 
nizes the elements of true piety, wherever found ; and de- 
tects the unity of the true members of Christ's Church amid 
all the varieties of discipline, and customs, and nations. The 
church history may be accessible to few : but the book of 
God's providence has other pages that are accessible to all. 
And how impressive may a Christian find this volume, as it 
contains, not the history of past centuries merely, but as it in- 
cludes his own career and that of his fellow-disciples person- 
ally known and dear to him. How much light is reflected 
back, from those pages of his personal experience and his 
own observation of God's dealings, upon the volume of Scrip- 
ture ; and how are the promises, the warnings, and the re- 
bukes of Scripture, shown under a new aspect. And not 
the history of the Church only, but the annals of the world 
become intelligible and profitable, only when studied as the 
book of God and of his Christ. Jesus, the Messiah, is the 
being whose advent and work knit together the raveled and 

* Psalm cvii. 43. 



358 THE CHURCH, 

tangled web of the world's history ; and give it symmetry and 
aim, a meaning and a plan. The first successful attempt to 
write a Universal History, as even irreligious critics allow, 
was that which was made on Christian principles, by Bos- 
suet, and all subsequent attempts to substitute a secular for a 
spiritual point of view, in a general history of the race, — to 
look at God's government of the world from the footstool and 
not from the throne, — from the plans of the creature, over- 
ruled and frustrated, and not from the plan of the Creator, 
overruling all and not to be frustrated by any ; — all attempts 
to delineate the school of God's Providence, as seen from 
the forms of the scholar and not as beheld from the seat of 
the great Teacher — all such earth-born schemes of writing 
a symmetrical history of man and of his earth, have failed and 
will fail. It is God's book : and to overlook Him and His 
purposes in it, is to tear out the title-page, and preface and 
index, from the volume. 

As geometry must be studied with diagrams, and as the 
readers of our age delight in a literature rich with pictorial 
illustrations, so has God enriched and illustrated, so to speak, 
the volume of his Scriptures with the pictured scenes of the 
volume of Providence. The problems and demonstrations 
of the one book, are made more plain by consulting the dia- 
grams of the other. 

Thus out of His volumes, as inscribed on man's memory 
and heart ; — as written upon the page of Scripture ; — and as 
delineated upon the pictured page of Providence, has the 
Great Teacher of this school for Heaven furnished manuals, 
to be pondered and collated by the human teachers and pu- 
pils of His church. These are our text-books in the school 
of Christ. We study any or all to profit, only under the eye 
of the great, Divine, and Invisible Teacher, the Holy Ghost. 

III. Lastly, let us dwell on the character of the learners 
in this, the academy that trains for heaven the children of 
earth. 

1. The universal race, the unawakened world of mankind 
are, then, to be invited to these studies. The books tell — 
Scripture distinctly — conscience and Providence by implica- 
tion — the destiny of the race. This Bible is the record of 
their Judge and their Redeemer. The Church is, of right 
and from Christ's organization, a missionary body, baptizing 
her converts under a missionary charter, and enlisting their 
services for a war of holy aggression, on a world lying prone 



A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 359 

and captive in the bonds of the wicked one, and in the prac- 
tice of all wickedness. " Go ye into all nations" is the voice 
yet ringing over all the forms of this school, from its pre- 
sent Saviour ; and breathed oft by the whisperings of the 
unseen Spirit into the ear of the missionary teacher. That 
it is little heeded and so scantily obeyed, this it is thatrcon- 
stitutes the guilt and shame of the Christian church. The 
feast was spread indeed for guests, many of whom, though 
bidden, would not come. But how sad the thought of the 
myriads never bidden by the Church. The school was 
opened for many who have refused to become learners there, 
yet what countless myriads have never heard even the Great 
Teacher's name, or seen one leaf, or read one line of the 
volume of His Scripture. 

2. But besides the world, all invited to be learners, the 
body of private members of the Church are, again, evidently 
learners in the school of Christ. They will profit, only as 
they reduce what they learn to practice, try the human teach- 
er by the Scripture, and compare the scriptural page with the 
books of Conscience and of Providence, and pray that upon 
themselves and their earthly instructors may ever rest the in- 
fluence of the Divine Teacher, the Paraclete. Thus prayer- 
ful and heedful, every visit to the sanctuary, every interview 
with a fellow-disciple, every Sabbath and every sermon be- 
come the means of edification, and minister to the daily 
growth of the Christian. His mind is educed and evolved. 
It unfolds like the flower, it towers like the oak. They shall 
grow as the lily, and cast forth their roots as Lebanon. He 
profits and is profited. The joy and crown of his pastor's 
rejoicing, he is the counsellor and friend and pattern of his 
fellow-members. The world is abashed before his transpa- 
rent sincerity and his unruffled meekness ; and, going from 
strength to strength, he appears at last before God, removed 
from the lower forms of earth to the higher level and the 
wider vision of the heavenly world. Seeing, here, through a 
glass darkly, and knowing but in part, there he knows even 
as he is known. 

3. But these are not the only learners. Pastors as well as 
their people learn. The earthly and visible teachers of the 
church are not released from the duty of continuing pupils 
in the school. Their profiting should appear to all men, 
and even the feeblest of their fellow-disciples, and the most 
inconsistent of their fellow-professors, may aid their spirit- 



360 THE CHURCH, 

ual education. As the birth of an infant into a household, 
and the claims it brings on the sympathies and cares of the 
elder children, train them to an affection and thoughtfulness 
before unknown ; so, the feeble and infirm of the flock may- 
augment the graces of their stronger brethren on whom 
they lean. The eye, the hand, and the foot, exchange mu- 
tual aid. If the eye now guides the hand, the hand at other 
times tears down the barriers that obstruct the vision of the 
eye. If the eye now directs the climbing foot, the foot it is 
that gains the mountain top, and gives to the eye the range 
of a wider horizon. At the bed-side of a dying child, or of 
an ignorant but godly Christian, what pastor has not had his 
religious attainments enlarged ? Even heresies may profit. 
They must be, said the apostle, that those who are approved 
may be made manifest. The fall of Peter in the high priest's 
hall, and his rebuke, in after days by Paul, for the want of 
Christian simplicity, served as a warning to each apostle who 
heard them. So even from the infirmities, divisions, and 
scandals of the churches, the spiritual man may extract les- 
sons of good. 

4. But beyond the world, and the private Christian, and 
the ministers of Christ's gospel, there is still another rank 
of learners, who gaze upon the lessons of this school. Faith 
sees, towering over the seats of the sanctuary, another rank 
of learners, all attent, and all believing. The Christian 
Church is a study to angels, so Paul asserts. " To the in- 
tent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly 
places might be known by the Church the manifold wisdom 
of God."* They gain, by the Spirit's government of the 
Church, new views of the evil of sin and the dangers of 
error ; and loftier conceptions of the extent of the Divine 
Love and the range of the Divine Wisdom. Jesus, the great 
Head of the Church, was " seen of angels." As of old 
their golden resemblances, the cherubim of the mercy-seat, 
bowed over the mystic contents of the ark, where the law of 
inflexible justice was resting beneath the lids of the mercy- 
seat on which was enthroned a God of forgiveness, so do 
these angels, not emblematically but really, )^et desire to 
" look into these things ;" and watch, with interest and sym- 
pathy, the course of those human spirits, once the children 
of wrath, whom grace has made the children of God, — once, 

* Ephcsians iii. 10. 



A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 361 

with Adam, learners, in the school of sin, of the fatal know- 
ledge of good and evil, and now, under the second Adam, 
learners of the knowledge of good, good only and ever- 
more. They rejoiced before the throne over the sinner's 
conversion. They minister to the onward course of the 
struggling saint. We forget this. Kneeling in feebleness, 
and gloom, and loneliness, in his secluded closet, the tempt- 
ed disciple seeing for the time but the visible, and forgetting 
the invisible, deems himself the unnoticed and solitary wres- 
tler, that is but " beating the air." He seems to urge an 
unheard plea, and hardly to maintain an unavailing strife. 
But, in truth, he is visible to those who are to him invisible. 
That solitary wrestler of the secluded closet is, in fact, the 
victorious athlete on whom is gathered the gaze of a vast, and 
thronged, and resplendent amphitheatre. He is watched 
by a great cloud of witnesses. "We are made," said the 
apostle, " a spectacle to angels and to men." And, above 
all, there rests upon him, evermore, the eye of his Father 
who seeth in secret and will reward him openly. 

Such are the instructors, lessons, and learners of the school 
God's grace has opened in the church of the redeemed. 

1. May not the recollections of the invisible and spiritual 
church, furnish the most availing counterpoise to the claims 
of Antichrist ? If, at first view, this imagery of a great Cath- 
olic and visible church, having wide nations in its communion, 
a visible head, and a long succession of such heads, enchant 
and overpower the imagination ; how do these dwindle and 
shrivel, beside the spiritual views the Scripture presents, of 
a great catholic, invisible church, of the elect of all times, 
now invisible but one day to be manifested, having an infalli- 
ble and sinless High Priest, Christ Jesus, really present unto 
all his worshippers, and a King who only hath immortality. 
To traditions, contradictory and obscure, locked up in de- 
cretals and acts of councils, and collections of papal bulls ; 
let us oppose the Eternal and Unerring Spirit, leading into 
all truth, accessible every where to prayer, and dwelling in 
the believer's heart — not to be sought at Rome by voyage 
and pilgrimage, but near as his word, in our mouth and our 
heart. The plea of private judgment, which some make the 
exclusive, and most the prominent point of resistance to the 
Roman argument, seems really liable to the objection Roman- 
ists adduce against it, of leading into wild and impious ration- 
alism. It is so liable, whenever severed from the recognition 
47 



362 THE CHURCH, 






of our continual dependence on the Divine Spirit, and sev- 
ered from his infallible faithfulness to our appeals, when that 
dependence is but acknowledged. Take these truths with 
it, and place them before it ; and the right of private judg- 
ment is impregnable. But sever them ; and the claims of 
antiquity, authority, and an infallible church, as the inter- 
preter of Scripture, become to some minds irresistible. 

2. Honor to the Divine Teacher is, then, the safeguard and 
glory of the Church, of the Theological school, of our pul- 
pits, and of our professorial chairs. Separate the visible and 
the invisible, exaggerate the sufficiency and power of the 
first, depreciate and forget the sovereignty of the last; let the 
usher affect independence of the Master, and let the minis- 
try, the human teachers of this school, overlook the Divine 
teachings of the Holy Ghost ; divorce the desk from the 
closet ; attempt to read the written page of Scripture, and the 
pictured page of Providence, and the blotted page of Con- 
science, apart from the Divine Interpreter of them all : and 
your pastorate becomes fruitless, your churches barren, and 
your students heretical. Puny sciolism is earth's best schol- 
arship, when it affects independence of the Holy Ghost. Let 
eloquence adorn, and science strengthen, the teachings thus 
opposed to the Holy Ghost, the work and the workman are 
something worse than worthless : they are accursed. The 
frosts of the second death will seal those fluent lips. The 
fires of the burning throne will smite the man thus faith- 
less as a shepherd of Christ's flock, and thus dishonest as 
the steward of the Divine mysteries, and who preaches re- 
ligious falsehood in the chair of spiritual verity. 

3. If the Church be indeed, in one of its multiform aspects, 
a school for Heaven, a device of Infinite Wisdom to urge 
and guide the powers of the soul in their onward and upward 
aspirations, it is manifestly the duty of the youthful student, 
who looks, as pastor or missionary, to aid and extend the 
Churches of Christ, to seek for himself, in the progress of his 
scholastic education, the benefits of this spiritual education, 
and to acquire a personal experience of the workings of 
church order, and the advantages of church fellowship. Not, 
as if it were to put himself under irksome restraints, but as 
a matter of delight and advantage to his own soul, and as a 
token of his own deference to that Great Teacher whom 
he is about to commend to others, he must value the Church 
which his Lord and Saviour organized ; and place himself 



A. SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 363 

under the cherishing and stimulating, the guardian and the 
impulsive influences of that school which Christ devised. 
Not that students should necessarily, or generally, even, be- 
come full members. But if, the desire to keep unbroken 
the ties of union to the Church of their original member- 
ship, seem to render their full dismission undesirable ; and 
the loss of all their licentiates for the ministry were, on 
the other hand, no inconsiderable and no safe sacrifice, to be 
made by the Churches abroad : this sundering of old ties and 
surrender of youthful licentiates might perhaps be avoided, 
and the end desired might yet be secured, if the churches 
abroad, instead of giving to these students the ordinary 
letter of recommendation, indefinite in extent of duration 
and vague in its address, as being intended for all churches 
alike, should give a special letter of recommendation, in the 
case of their students at the Theological Seminary. This 
peculiar letter of commendation might recommend them, for 
certain years of their studies, to the peculiar church of that 
Seminary, as subjects of its special care and recipients of all 
its advantages. There would, thus, be given to the church 
of the Seminary its special right to expect the communion 
in its ordinances, and the aid in its services of the young stu- 
dent, while leaving to the original church all rights of final 
discipline and entire dismission. Thus the church, at the 
scene of their studies, would serve as the trustee, with lim- 
ited and defined powers, of the church of their proper mem- 
bership ; and the youthful scholar would not, amid his 
books and lectures, want this education, an education equally 
valuable with books and lectures, and that the church affords 
in its various services, and its mutual sympathies and cares. 
4. If God, the Highest, comes down to the minds of the 
feeble and the ignorant who sit in His school, the Church, 
surely it should be the joy of the Christian scholar to bring 
down his highest attainments to the aid of the least and of 
the least esteemed in Christ's Church. The beam that drops 
out of the side of the sun into the heart of the violet, paint- 
ing it with its rich hues, has travelled myriads of miles with 
the utmost speed, and, past stars and systems, it shot along its 
undiverted way, to reach that lowly end, and to do this its ap- 
pointed errand — So let the youthful servants of the cross, in 
fetching like Elihu their knowledge from afar,* delight glad- 

* Job xxxvi. 3. 



364 THE CHURCH, 

ly to distil its results into the lowliest offices of the pastorate, 
and instead of seeking after high things, condescend to men 
of low estate, as the true ministers of a Teacher, who hum- 
bled himself, coming not to be ministered unto but to min* 
ister, and who had fishermen for his apostles. 

We trust, there are none such among the youthful stu- 
dents of this Institution ; but, to an evil, in some quarters 
betraying itself, it is fitting to allude in the modes its vota- 
ries will best understand. If an affectation of gentility be the 
highest aim of any misguided youth, who has condescended 
to patronize the religirm of that Carpenter's Son, who de- 
meaned Himself so far even, as to die the malefactors' 
death ; why should such an aspirau cling to the ministra- 
tions of a faith, which must be, to his first principles of con- 
duct, so uncongenial and repulsive ? Let him rather ' sacri- 
fice to the Graces,' and restore that elegant Polytheism, 
whose fall Gibbon deplored. Seeking, first and evermore, 
the honor that cometh from man, he is likely to become 
more versed in the gospel according to Chesterfield, than in 
either of the four evangelists. Conscious, although he may 
have little claim to talent, attainments, or piety, that he is 
clothed with what to him seem far higher endowments than 
are these, why should he sully his exquisite nature with 
preaching a Gospel, which its Founder gave especially for 
the poor? Can any good thing come out of Nazareth ? How 
can the elegant youth consent to put the mark of his distin- 
guished approbation upon the Bible, on learning that it 
actually contains the awkward and astounding fact, that an- 
gels from heaven once were seen rendering lowly service 
to a dead beggar? And this, too, when by continuing their 
progress but a few paces farther, they might have been hon- 
ored with the hospitalities of a member of ' good society,' who 
was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously 
every day. On learning, from some devouter friend, that 
the New Testament actually contained the unaccountable 
recital, and on ascertaining, from some more studious asso- 
ciate, that German criticism has not pronounced the strange 
narrative an interpolation, how could the refined and es- 
senced candidate for the Christian ministry explain, with 
courtly dignity, so much neglect of those within the pale of 
refined society, and such undue familiarity toward one with- 
out that dread enclosure? If he did not, with indignation, 
repudiate the volume, the best apology his ingenuity could 



A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 365 

construct for intelligences so regardless of all social distinc* 
tions, must be, that all this occurred before the manuals of 
politeness, now so valuable and so common, were published, 
and that perhaps it was not the felicity of angels, even in 
these later times, to be intimately acquainted with Chester- 
field. The delicate youth must hope, that the society, which 
in the high festivals of heaven recline near the bosom of 
Abraham, have become of late years more select than when 
they admitted Lazarus : else can they expect to be honored 
by the accession to their number of a well-bred pastor and 
his well-bred converts, who, while extending a proper patron- 
age to the Bible, feel, with a more lively faith, the all-suffi- 
ciency of Fashion, that capricious and despotic deity? 

Brethren, we are persuaded better things of you, though 
we thus speak. We trust, that you would emulate the 
spirit of that apostle, courteous indeed, and magnanimous, 
if ever man was ; but who said : If I yet pleased men, I 
should not be the servant of Christ.* Let others forge anew 
the golden calf, and dance around it, even at the foot of the 
quaking Sinai. Fix your eye on the smoking summit ; and 
let the thunder of its oracles drown, in your ears, the tink- 
ling of their cymbals ; and count yourself more honored than 
annoyed, by the scorn they may lavish on you, for the re- 
fusal to share their adorations. The Christian preacher is 
not the man of any caste : in lowliness, he is to deem him- 
self beneath the meanest ; but, in the dignity of his mission, 
and in the authority of his Master, he is entitled to look 
down on the loftiest and mightiest of earth's transgressors. 

5. Education, for the judgment day and for eternity, is the 
first and last business of this life. Are we thus educated 
ourselves, and educating others? It is this, the invisible 
and the endless, that must give due authority to our mes- 
sage, and effect to our testimony. Soon, brethren in the 
pastorate, the invisible realities of eternity will have become 
visible. As the dreams of the sleeper vanish, when the 
films of sleep melt from his eyes ; and the real world, unseen 
during his slumbers, floats in upon his awaking : — so, breth- 
ren in the ministry, will it soon be with us and w r ith our 
hearers. The day — that day — will try our work, of what 
sort it is. The dreams and phantoms, that now occupy man- 
kind, will disappear, when the night is once past ; and the 

* Galat. i. 10. 



366 THE CHURCH, A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 

dread, or the glorious realities of eternity, of which we tes- 
tify, will take their place. The Invisible God, of our sanc- 
tuaries and our closets, will become the Visible God, of the 
judgment-seat. Let us, like Moses, now, by faith, " discern 
Him, the Invisible." Let us remember, that, when Daniel 
stood before Belshazzar, the monarch and his appalled court- 
iers quaked, not so much before the visible and human pro- 
phet, as before that prophet's Invisible Master, whose hand 
only was seen, tracing on the wall the dread characters of 
doom. There might well have been, in that court, many a 
more august visage, and a sterner voice, than were Daniel's ; 
but behind the human messenger loomed the dread majesty of 
that Almighty Avenger, for whom he spake. So must it be 
with us. Let our churches, and congregations, be compelled 
to recognize, behind the mortal pastor, who is but the human 
and visible usher in Christ's school ; looming in Divine Ma- 
jesty, the Invisible and Almighty Teacher of the Church, 
and Sovereign of the world. Thus only, shall we benefit 
both. The churches, honoring Him, will be compacted into 
unity, and developed into symmetry. The body of Christ 
will grow evermore, in his likeness. For the students in 
the school of Christ never graduate. Throughout all eter- 
nity, theirs is a growing expansion of intellect, and a widen- 
ing range of intelligence ; and as death puts no end to their 
spiritual being, so the universe interposes no barrier to their 
endless advancement. Thus, too, shall we benefit the uncon- 
verted as well ; and startle a doomed world, to a salutary 
fear, and a saving faith, as they shall see the pulpit itself, but 
in the foreground, and rising awfully, in the distance be- 
hind, the Great White Throne. "The things which 
are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are 
eternal." 






THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH AGAINST THOSE 
DELIGHTING IN WAR. ' 

(A Discourse delivered on the first Sabbath of the year 1847.) 

" SCATTER THOU THE PEOPLE THAT DELIGHT IN WAR." — Psalm lxviU. 30. 

It was said by the Queen Regent of Scotland, when speak- 
ing of the great Reformer of that country, whose principles 
she hated, whilst she was awed by his piety, that " she 
dreaded the prayers of John Knox more than an army of ten 
thousand men." And better and safer were it, my beloved 
hearers, to face a cloud of hurtling spears, and to bear the iron 
rain of arrow and javelin, and a wiser venture were it to walk 
up to the park of artillery, pealing from its mouth a fiery 
sleet of death, than to encounter the prayers of God's saints 
united with resistless urgency, and darting with invisible 
potency against ue and our cause. We have here the Zion 
of the Most High, lifting up, as by the single but inspired 
voice of David, their protest, their supplication, and their 
adjuration against all who find pleasure in scenes of carnage 
and reckless devastation. Now the prayers which our Heav- 
enly Father has taught to His people, reveal the principles 
upon which He administers His government of the nations. 
The God-given supplications of the Church, by implication, 
teach the statutes of the Head of the Church. The prayer 
which inspiration has furnished, Providence will accomplish. 
What He bids us ask Him to do, we may be assured, He 
means Himself to do. The petitions He indites, and the 
edicts He promulgates, are identical in their tenor. 

Our country is at this time engaged in war against a neigh- 
boring nation. It is impossible but that the question of the 
lawfulness of this present contest, and indeed of all war, 
should be agitated. It is, in no sense, our intention, nor is it 
our province, to prostitute the influence of the pulpit to the 
uses of political partisanship. But we hold that a religious 



368 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 

teacher may state what he believes to be the teachings of the 
Bible on the rights and the wrongs, the duties and the sins 
of his times. He is not to shrink from rebuking sin in the 
powerful, more than in the obscure and the poor ; in the 
many more than in the few ; in the sovereign, more than in 
the subject. Thus Nathan discharged his office, unavved by 
the station, the power, or the feelings of David, the writer 
of this Psalm ; thus Ahab, though a sovereign, found a re- 
prover in his subject Elijah ; and thus Herod quailed before 
the stern fidelity of John the Baptist ; and thus, too, Paul 
the apostle, before a magistrate whose enmity it was, in his 
condition as a prisoner, peculiarly dangerous to incur, and 
whose character was neither marked by righteousness nor 
temperance, nor fears of judgment in this world or the next, 
chose to testify of the virtues in which his judge was deficient, 
and dared to remind him of a tribunal where he, with his 
meanest victim, must stand equally amenable. Sin, then, 
wherever found, as it is God's enemy, is the fair quarry and 
mark of the preacher to whom God has said, as to his pro- 
phet of old, " Preach the preaching that I bid thee."* 

With us the people hold the sovereignty. It is the prin- 
ciple of the gospel that " he that ruleth " should do it " with 
diligence"] — or know his responsibilities, and strenuously 
aim to meet them. The people, like all other sovereigns, 
owe allegiance to the " Blessed and only Potentate "J above, 
and may well study, therefore, His oracles for their guidance, 
implore His favor in the ways of obedience, as the only con- 
dition of perfect and permanent safety, and deprecate His 
wrath, as involving sure and remediless ruin to the stormy 
and multitudinous democracy, no less than to the solitary 
despot. The pulpit may then censure national as well as 
individual sins, and bring up the great principles which con- 
trol or should control the movement of the masses, as well 
as the precepts that require the obedience of individuals in 
private life. 

But, on the other hand, the minister of the gospel may 
not be a mere politician. He may see in all political organi- 
zations too much of inconsistency and corruption, to attach 
himself blindly to the guidance of any. He sees sins in 
the men of all forms of government, and in the members 
of all political confederations ; and he sees also in men of 

* Jonah iii. 2. t Rom. xii. 8. I 1 Tim. vi. 15. 



AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 369 

every class, and tribe, and country, the abject, the hostile 
and the criminal, souls infinitely precious. His Master has 
proclaimed that His " kingdom is not of this world." The 
Church of Christ may not then become the drudge and 
tool of any ruler, or people, much less of any section of a 
people. The conversion of a soul is to the true pastor, in 
his better hours, of more moment than the political interests 
of an empire. Never then may questions of government 
become with him paramount to the great truths of the gos- 
pel, sin and Hell, conversion and Heaven, an eternal salva- 
tion and an everlasting perdition, the atoning Redeemer, 
and the renewing, sanctifying Spirit. When, losing these 
views, the pulpit becomes the mere channel of political con- 
troversy, it damages the Church without benefiting the 
State. Jesuitism gave to kings and courts its own confess- 
ors, thus pouring through the ears of a monarch its own 
principles into the counsels of his cabinet. Protestantism 
would not be more wisely or honorably employed, were it to 
send its ministers to crowd the antichambers or climb the 
backstairs of rulers, or to edit for the sovereign nation their 
political journals. A teacher of Christ's gospel has higher, 
better work, than that of the mere politician, though the poli- 
tician is not beyond the purview of the great principles which 
the Christian minister is to expound and enforce. And, on 
the other hand, as we have sought to show, the minister of 
Christ may preach of national sins, where nations do sin, 
and announce from the exhaustless and unerring oracles of 
the Universal Sovereign, the great elementary laws of na- 
tional duty. In doing this, he may for the time be claimed 
by one party, or branded by another, as doing a work of 
political partisanship. Imputations of a similar kind are in 
his path, in the discharge of many other duties. He cannot 
interfere in healing private grievances, or re-uniting brethren 
that contend, or in administering the discipline of the Church, 
but at the price of similar misconstructions. Misconception 
and reproach are to some extent inevitable. His duty, it 
would seem to us, is to lay down great principles — to avoid, 
as far as possible, all interference with personal and political 
details, and eyeing God's truth as his law, to commend his 
work to God's judgment, indifferent to man's praise or blame, 
so he have but testified for God, and before Him — for God, 
the truth, — before God, that truth in sincerity. 

These remarks may have seemed tedious. They appeared 
48 



370 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 

to us necessary, as vindicating and explaining what we sup- 
pose are the rights of the Christian ministry in such matters. 
We entreat, now, your attention and patient consideration, 
and the aid of your prayers, that the All-ruling and All-en- 
lightening God may give us to know and say, see and obey 
His own Truth, as we examine the lesson of the Psalmist's 
prayer. 

Our text presents a great principle in the Divine govern- 
ment. He will, as his Church prays that he would, " scatter 
the people that delight in war." His Providence has re- 
echoed and interpreted His Scripture in this respect. 

In the secluded valleys of the Pyrenees in southern France, 
have been found for centuries an outcast and scattered race, 
generally maimed, covered with tatters and vermin, and the 
victims of scrofula and leprosy, who are called- the Cagots. 
They have for centuries been a separate people from the 
peasants around, the objects of contempt, hatred and per- 
secution ; the vilest offences have been imputed to them ; 
and most trades and professions barred against them. They 
were, in earlier centuries, required to wear on their clothes 
some mark to distinguish them from others, were permit- 
ted to enter the church only by a separate door, long were 
denied sepulture in the ordinary burial grounds, and the 
priests refused to admit them to confession ; they wandered 
about without fire in winter, with no settled habitation, re- 
tiring at night to barns and hovels. In ancient times, the 
testimony of seven of them was held equivalent to the evi- 
dence of one freeman. The antiquaries of France have been 
divided and perplexed as to the origin of these people, and 
of that envenomed hostility and prejudice which bayed and 
snarled at their feet, wherever they wandered, an abject and 
outcast race. The most plausible opinion is that they are the 
remains of a race once an invading and powerful one, since 
subjugated and scattered, and that the remembrance of their 
old cruelties is the origin of those long centuries of cruel op- 
pression they have undergone. Some find in their very 
name traces of their descent from those mighty and valiant 
Goths who in earlier centuries rolled their successive billows 
of desolation over so many kingdoms of Europe.* If this be 
so, here have we, in the Providence of God, such reply to 
and confirmation of the voice of Scripture as we have already 

* See Appendix. 



AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 371 

described. But whether the " scattered " and peeled, the 
pale, timid and abject Cagot, be or be not the descendant of 
the bold and warlike Goth, " delighting in war," the princi- 
ple of our text stands not on the right or wrong interpreta- 
tion of that dark and difficult page in European history. The 
whole volume of history establishes the truth, in instances 
not dubious, not few, and not remote. War, loved for its 
own sake, ultimately "scatters" the nation thus sanguinary 
in their tastes. Those taking the sword with bloodthirsty 
carelessness, perish by it. 

But is all war thus visited and thus condemned as displeas- 
ing to God? We do not see the scriptural evidence that 
it is. 

I. We would then, first, examine the question, Is all war 
sinful ? 

II. Next we would consider the class undoubtedly sinful, 
and here denounced, "who delight in war." 

III. And in the last place, we would return to the punish- 
ment here invoked upon such from God : that they should 
be dispersed and reduced: " scattered " by the whirlwind 
they have loved to raise and to ride. 

I. We cannot, then, with some Christians, believe that all 
war is forbidden by the gospel. Private revenge is undoubt- 
edly forbidden, but so is not Divine vengeance. It is be- 
yond all question, we think, prohibited to unite the Church 
with the State, and so make Christ's kingdom of this world ; 
but although the Christian faith is forbidden to seek the aid 
and endowment of government, government itself is not made 
an unlawful and unchristian thing. They who from the law 
in the Sermon on the Mount, where private quarrels are 
discouraged by the command to turn, when smitten on the 
one cheek, the other also, educe the sweeping inference, that 
the magistrate and the soldier are usurpers, ought, in con- 
sistency, to give the same broad interpretation to another 
command in the same discourse, that we give to all asking, 
and turn not from the borrower ; and then if the first pre- 
cept forbids forcible government and war, the second pro- 
hibits all claim of private property. For what is war but for- 
cible government — physical might sustaining moral right? 
Now Paul expressly taught that the magistrate was not to bear 
the sword in vain. What is the sword? An instrument 
forged for the single and express purpose of taking away, not 
brutal, but human life, Paul teaches, then (or rather Paul's 



372 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 

Master, Christ, and the inspiring and unerring Holy Ghost, 
teach by him), that the magistrate may take man's life. Val- 
uable as human life may be, right and order are yet dearer ; 
and to maintain the last, the just and pious governor may take 
away the first. In the case of a single wrong-doer, this is capi- 
tal punishment. When several wrong-doers combine, when the 
offenders are more than a mob, — a disorganized and revolted 
province, — or a hostile and wrong-doing nation, this is war — ■ 
and such violent wrong maybe resisted on Christian principles 
by physical force. But it is urged, is not the spread of Chris- 
tianity to abolish, in the last days, war, and .o convert the 
sword into the plowshare 1 We allow this, but the Scripture 
represents the gospel as abolishing war, just as it abolishes 
aw-suits, not by rendering the one or the other unlawful 
or unchristian, but by abating and suppressing men's wrong 
feelings, and thus exterminating those acts which make the 
suit before a tribunal, or the appeal to arms, necessary for 
the vindication of right. Judges are not unlawful, although 
so much of litigation is unreasonable and wicked. War is not 
unscriptural, although existing wars so often be most unjust. 
But, is it urged that it is not consistent with the spiritual 
character of Christ's new and blessed dispensation, to uphold 
moral right with animal, physical force? We answer, God's 
whole government proceeds on the principle of doing so. 
He plagues the sinner with bodily disease. Outward trouble 
visited the sin of Uzziah, and brought to Manasseh spiritual 
healing. He vexes the guilty inhabitants of earth with fam- 
ine and pestilence, and with physical destruction from the 
earthquake and volcano ; and He calls them to recognize 
His equity and His spirituality and His wisdom in these 
physical inflictions, as well as in the moral influences of His 
word and His Spirit. What is the voice of the fiery pit of 
wo ? Is not its anguish in part a physical anguish, as de- 
scribed by the Judge himself, our Lord Jesus, when he de- 
clares that both soul and body are cast into hell ? 

And it should be observed, that after those times of spirit- 
ual reformation, when peace shall long prevail over the whole 
earth, and the Millennial rest be enjoyed, the Bible seems to 
represent the return of a time when there shall be war again 
between the saints of God's Church and the enemies of that 
Church. God's people are not depicted as passive victims, 
but as strenuous combatants in that conflict. The triumph 
of the gospel, through Earth's long Sabbath, had not made 



AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 373 

\rar unlawful, but only for one thousand years unnecessary. 
If war, as some represent it, were in all cases but promiscu- 
ous butchery and murder multiplied, would it ever have been 
said, as it is in the imagery of the Apocalypse, that there was 
" war in Heaven," and would it have been proclaimed, as it 
is of the Lord Jesus himself, in that book, that in "faithful- 
ness he doth judge and make war?" Is this tantamount 
to the declaration (as some ultraists in the advocacy of 
peace define war) in reference to the Saviour Jesus, that 
in faithfulness he murders? Forbid the blasphemy! No. 
But it teaches the great truth already indicated, that the faith- 
fulness of Jesus Christ as universal Governor, w T ill be mani- 
fested in " judging " those who acknowledge, and in " war- 
ring " against those who defy his sway. He will dispense 
his enactments and instructions as a judge, and if to some 
these avail not, he will resort to force, physical force, as the 
Just Governor of the Universe, making war upon and sub- 
duing its criminals and revolters. 

And when Christ came himself into the world, neither he 
nor his immediate forerunner, the Baptist, nor his followers 
the Apostles, though under plenary inspiration, taught that 
the profession of arms was unlawful and murderous. John 
the Baptist instructed soldiers to be content with their wages. 
If he had regarded these wages as but the price of blood, 
would such have been the lessons of a Reformer, come in the 
spirit and power of Elias, to denounce all sin, and to require 
a general and prayerful repentance ? So the Acts of the Apos- 
tles contain not the slightest intimation, that Cornelius the 
Roman centurion, a chief of soldiers, was required by the 
Holy Spirit which he received to abandon his post ; nor that 
Sergius Paulus, the Governor, was commanded to relinquish 
his connection with the central government at Rome, essen- 
tially and in all its relations a military and war-making power. 
The description given of the attendant of Cornelius, seems 
unaccountable, if the views of some Christians against all 
war were correct. " A devout soldier," on these principles, 
is as great an anomaly as a religious assassin or a seraphic 
poisoner. 

But it is said that the early Christians held war unlawful. 
This we deny on the authority of Neander, one of the high- 
est authorities in such a question.* There seem to have 

* In his " Denkwurdigkeiten," and his Church History. 



374 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 

been those in the second and third centuries among them 
doubting its propriety ; but that it was not with the early 
Christians a prevalent sentiment, appears sufficiently from 
the boast of Tertullian, when he represents Christians as fill- 
ing the Roman camps as well as forums. Their conversion 
to Christ had not driven them from the standards of their 
country. 

God has authority, it will be allowed, to take away life. 
He may grant it to human governments. It seems to us a 
plain teaching of Scripture that he has done so. Force may 
sustain Right. This, against a single wrong-doer, becomes 
imprisonment, and may become capital punishment — against 
a multitude of wrong-doers it becomes war. Dear as human 
life may be, the sentiment of every heart is that there are 
blessings that should be yet dearer. The martyr relinquishes 
his life rather than forego the truth, because truth should be 
dearer than life. The criminal forfeits his life to justice, 
because justice is and should be dearer than life. And God, 
in the case of the occupation of Canaan by Israel, explicitly 
required war, and that a war of devastation. Its Hittites and 
Perizzites were criminals of an aggravated turpitude and 
audacious hardihood in crime. He was their magistrate. 
The Jew was his commissioned executioner. 

And whilst we allow that in war all forms of wickedness 
are generally rife, and that war is always a calamity, and 
generally an enormous crime on the one side or the other, 
or perhaps occasionally on both, we cannot but think that 
the voice of conscience and history, and the common senti- 
ment of mankind testify, that in the terrible conflicts of war 
have also been seen specimens of the high and heroic devel- 
opment of our nature. Joshua, and David, and the noble 
Jonathan, all warriors, were they not men of the highest 
excellence ? Was not Abraham, the father of the faithful, 
blessed by Melchisedec, the holy prince of Salem, as he 
returned from a warlike foray and rescue? Can the heart 
think coldly of Leonidas, holding with his brave band the nar- 
row strait against the dense masses of his country's invaders ; 
or of Arnold de Winkelreid, the Swiss worthy, making a prac- 
ticable breach for his compatriots in the spear-bearing and ser-' 
ried ranks of the enemy by gathering " a sheaf of their spears" 
into his single breast? And Christian virtue, too, has been 
found, and that of a high order, amid the din and carnage of 
the camp. Baxter was an army chaplain when he wrote the 






AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 375 

Saint's Everlasting Rest. Hampden, we believe, died the 
death of a Christian as well as a patriot, when mortally 
wounded in defence of his country's liberties, unjustly and 
tyrannically assailed by the First Charles. Col. Hutchinson, 
one of the converts to the views of the Baptists in the times 
of the Commonwealth, was a soldier as well as a Christian ; 
and so was the upright, ardent, and indomitable Harrison, 
another Baptist of the Commonwealth, who in the Restora- 
tion suffered death as one of the judges of Charles. Col. 
Blackadder, a Scotch officer, was eminent for piety among 
the officers, as John Haimes, one of Wesley's exhorters, was 
among the privates of the English armies in Flanders ; and 
by the labors of the last, the work of conversion went on 
amid battles and sieges. Col. Gardiner, we doubt not, be- 
lieved himself as really serving God when, fighting against 
the return of the Stuarts, and with them of Romanism, to 
the throne of England, he perished by Highland claymores 
on the field of Preston Pans, as when a few hours before he 
had been bowing the knee in private devotion to his God. 

It is, we suppose, a plain teaching of Scripture that war 
is not in all cases unlawful. It is a principle with God, 
that when Reason and Conscience will not restrain wrong, 
then Might, physical Might, shall. He acts upon it Himself. 
He authorizes government to act upon it. Indeed, it is a 
right necessary to the very existence of government, and 
government we suppose necessary to the continued existence 
of the race, as it certainly is to their well-being. The ruler 
may not only advise and entreat, he may, and if it be neces- 
sary, he must also coerce. 

II. But it may be asked, if war be allowable, is not " de- 
light in war " also allowable ? We answer, this by no means 
follows. Brutus believed that justice required it of him to 
condemn his own sons to death. But whilst this was patriot- 
ism, it would have been brutality had he " delighted " in the 
terrible sacrifice. Abraham honored God when, at his re- 
quirement, he lifted the knife against the white, soft neck of 
his only, his promised child Isaac ; but he would have dis- 
honored himself and his God, had he gloated with "delight" 
over the prospect of seeing soon the severed veins, the spout- 
ing blood, and the writhing limbs of his darling son. The 
officer who for just cause inflicts the last sanction of the law 
on some foul murderer, may but do his duty. But the spec- 
tator, who has what some men have shown a perverted taste, 



3?6 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 

relishing executions, and who loves the sight of a dying wretch 
in his last agonies, is not to be respected or excused. The 
distinction between " warring " and delighting in war," 
is a broad one. It is the same in principle as that which 
separates the parent who chastises his child reluctantly, and 
from a sense of duty, and the hardened and unnatural father, 
who delights to worry and torture his offspring, and beats 
from his delight in the infliction of pain. It is the difference 
between the surgeon who amputates to lessen suffering, and 
the Indian tormenting his captive in every mode that a fierce 
ingenuity can devise to heighten pain into intolerable intensity. 

We may do, and rightfully do, acts in which we have no 
right to delight. A wise teacher will not delight in rebuke, 
yet rebuke may be at times inevitable and profitable. A 
Church of Christ may be compelled to exscind an offending 
member, but they can never delight in it ; however, it may 
be not only lawful, but even demanded of them, so that the 
neglect of it would be unlawful and criminal. 

When we remember the misery and devastation, the rapine 
and conflagration, the violence and carnage, the privations 
and bereavements, the orphanage and widowhood, the muti- 
lations and butcheries that war involves, and the bitter feuds 
between conterminous nations, which have been transmitted 
to successive generations by its means, we must see that it 
is, even w T hen most mercifully managed, a tremendous evil, 
a last and terrible resort. It is only as the inevitable and 
just defence of Right that it is itself defensible or even tole- 
rable. When pushed beyond the limits which the vindication 
of a momentous right requires, or when itself founded on 
Wrong, it is a crime of huge and indescribable enormity, an 
offence alike against the Earth whose peace it disturbs, and 
the Heaven whose justice it defies. But there are those 
who, without respect to the justice or injustice, the right or 
wrong of a war, seem to find pleasure in its excitement, 
its perils, the honors it wins for the victor, or the plunder 
with which it enriches or the power wherewith it invests him. 
David seems to have warred generally from a regard to the 
rights of his people. His kinsman and general, Joab, brave 
but unprincipled and sanguinary, seems to have delighted in 
the game of battle for its own sake. 

1. Very many, then, it is to be feared, of those who fight 
the battles of a country, come within the range of the impre- 
cation here uttered. The private soldier is often one who 



AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 377 

looks to scenes of lawless riot and easy plunder as the chief 
inducements to enlist under the standards of his country; as 
the officer who commands him may often be careless of the 
waste of life, if it but minister to his promotion and gain. 

2. The classes who sustain war are often involved in the 
same condemnation. The army contractor, who accumulates 
wealth easily and rapidly, at the expense of the lives of an 
invading host, and the butchery and plunder of an invaded 
nation, does not he, with a cruel and bloody love of lucre, 
"delight in war?" The farmers of England, from the rise 
in the price of agricultural products occasioned by the needs 
of their large armies, became wealthy in their long wars 
with France, and delighted in contests that thus enhanced 
their gains ; though in later years, among the bones imported 
from Continental battle-fields to manure the lands of Eng- 
land, some of these same men probably received the remains 
of their own sons, killed in battle, and by the strange retribu- 
tions of Providence, now returned to fatten the paternal 
acres. Any portion of our own territory benefited by the 
demand for provisions which war would create, but not ex- 
posed by maritime position, or other causes, to the invasions 
it provokes, would be likely to furnish a similar class, reck- 
lessly rejoicing in what ruined others to enrich them. 

3. The rulers who wage war too often incur this condem- 
nation. History has greatly and generally belied kings, if 
they have not plunged their people into most causeless, cruel, 
and protracted conflicts upon the most frivolous pretexts, or 
with the most crying injustice. Territory, or glory, or plun- 
der, has been the object. Lives they have estimated as the 
vile price, cheaply paid for the coveted prize. When the 
Supreme Governor " shall make inquisition for blood," who 
will envy their fame, rank, or power ? Nor are such un- 
worthy motives unknown in other than monarchical govern- 
ments. Ambition may render the demagogue as sanguinary 
in his heartless recklessness as the despot. The froth and 
foam of a speech enkindling every bad passion may cost the 
blood of hapless hundreds. Reports drafted in the quiet 
peace of a cabinet, may to the presaging eye seem dripping 
with more of gore than all that any one bayonet ever shed. 
The desire of personal distinction, or the eagerness for party 
triumph, may induce men to carve, as it were, the whitened 
bones of their fellow-citizens into dice for the gamblings 
of political strife. A Syrian Pacha, under the Ottoman 

49 



378 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 

Porte, in the last generation, gloried in the epithet of Djezzar 
or butcher, that his remorseless murders had won him. The 
political aspirants, and orators, and statesmen, that bring on, 
for selfish purposes, a needless or an unjust war — what are. 
they but the Djezzars of a republic ? The tears of the 
widow and of the fatherless orphan may run unstaunched for 
weary years, if they but drench and freshen the laurels of 
these votaries of glory. The wealth of the merchant may 
be confiscated, and the gains of the industrious artisan, to 
swell the prize-money of the privateersman, thence to run 
speedily into the exchequer of the dram-shop and the bro- 
thel — scenes of riot and debauch, that are like the miry 
places of the prophet's vision, the moral quagmires of the 
state. 

4. The literary classes of a nation may have their share 
in the woes of our text. The true rulers of a people are 
often, less the men recognized as magistrates and monarchs 
by the ensigns of office, and rather the popular authors Avho 
give coloring to the tastes and sentiments, and shape to the 
principles of their times. Wearing no tiara, wielding no 
sceptre, they are yet often really throned as rulers in the 
mind of the nation and the age. When these, as such in 
authority, feed a taste for war, reckless of right, and greedy 
only of glory and plunder, they sin, and God holds them 
answerable for the homes from which they lure the adven- 
turous son or husband enlisting for a soldier's perils — and an- 
swerable for the darker desolation of the abodes into which 
war carries pollution and remorseless carnage. Poetry has 
too much made the fray, and the banner, and nodding 
plume, the resounding march, and the murderous volley, its 
favorite themes, careless of the right or wrong of the quarrel. 
And one of the many causes of contention that Virtue and 
Piety have with the drama, especially in modern times, is its 
love of slaughter, and the insane profusion with which it as- 
sumes to expend human life like water, and gluts and fires 
an admiring crowd with its spectacles of imaged suicide and 
murder. Into these things a God of justice will search. They 
have helped to make fallen man, like the tiger, raven for 
blood. When our own Robert Hall urged the volunteers of 
his country to contend against foreign invasion, he did not 
unwisely or wrongly. But he who, irrespective of the justice 
of the contest, delights in blood shedding, (if left to have 
his own solitary and undisputed influence,) would convert 



AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 379 

society into a shambles, and quench freedom, industry, and 
knowledge in a Red Sea of blood. 

5. A nation itself may become passionately enamored of 
war. Intoxicated by glory, and swollen with plunder, rich 
and easily won, how many a people, in the history of the 
race, originally simple, free, and comparatively happy, have 
become drunk with blood. For a time, God made them his 
terrible scourges, but the time of retribution always came. 
No nation delighting in war for its own sake, but has had, 
in time, the poisonous chalice pressed to its own loathing 
lips, and the spoiler has been in his turn the spoiled, and the 
terrible of one age has become the contemptible of the next. 
In a government constituted like our own, the acts of the 
rulers are, more than with most other people, the acts of the 
entire nation. If we have as a people been, as some con- 
tend, driven by the misconduct of an enemy into our present 
contest, well will it be for our rulers and ourselves, in the 
day of unerring scrutiny and final decision. But if, as others 
insist, we have transcended a known and rightful boundary, 
to provoke war, " removing the land-mark," which, a sin as 
God has made it in the individual, is not less sin surely in a 
nation ; or if we have rushed into a war for which there 
might be some provocation, without exhausting all possible 
efforts to avoid this melancholy alternative, they who have 
caused, and who continue, and who uphold the conflict, 
must answer it to One, whose rules of judgment were not 
learned in earthly cabinets, and whose statutes may not be 
set aside by protocols and proclamations. 

III. We have now reached the third and last division of 
our subject — the prayer that God would scatter those who 
thus love the bloody game of war. It is the prayer of the 
groaning conscience, sick of the horrors of a needless and 
unrighteous contest — the prayer of the outraged affections 
stung into keenest sympathy in the view of mourning fami- 
lies, and weeping and fatherless children, and bleeding afresh 
with each new incident of massacre and desolation brought 
in the journals of the contest — the prayer of Industry, driven 
from its wonted tasks, and taxed for aid it is loth to give — 
and the prayer of Humanity, acknowledging in the foe, 
plundered, and defeated, and dying, a man and brother. 
But it is above all the prayer of Christianity, anxious that as 
war was hushed at the Saviour's birth, to give to the new 
message of peace with Heaven a free course over the quiet 



380 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 

nations, so now the cause of Missions may be no longer 
hindered by the outbreak of war, and the tumult of battle, 
but universal peace make ready the way of the Lord ; and 
that instead of a strife as to strength, and a rivalry in the 
infliction and endurance of injury, the only contest may be 
the emulation of brothers, in the manifestation of mutual 
kindness, and in the service of a common father — a common 
Brother and Redeemer. Mute Nature, speechless as she is 
before man, is not so before her Maker in this quarrel. 
The earth, from which cried the blood of the first-slain Abel, 
has it ceased to cry, as fresh victims watered it with their 
opened veins ? No ; Earth, " the creation made subject unto 
vanity not willingly," cries, "Lord, how long?" And the 
Church cries, Scatter, O Lord, the nations and the hosts, 
the parties and the cabinets that delight in war. 

2. The prayer has been in times past fulfilled. We have 
seen how, if the Cagots of France be indeed, as some anti- 
quarians believe them, the relics of the old and valiant and 
terrible Goths, they illustrate the tremendous significance of 
the text. Based as the prayer is on a recognized principle 
of the Divine government, that existed ere the Psalm was 
inspired, we see that principle ere the Psalmist's days, an- 
nounced in God's treatment of some of the ancestors of that 
Psalmist's nation, Simeon and Levi. They had recourse to 
treacherous butchery for the avenging of a domestic wrong, 
and as their dying father, in denouncing their conduct, said, 
" Cursed be their anger for it was fierce, and their wrath 
for it was cruel :" and he added in the name of his God, " I 
will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in, Israel."* 
Read the fortunes of Egypt. In ancient days her Sesos- 
tris led the pride and prowess of Mizraim in triumphant 
invasion into distant lands. Now beside the lofty walls yet 
brilliantly commemorating those conquests, and painting the 
victor, and his car, and his triumphal train, cowers the mod- 
ern Copt, a craven and timorous slave, building his hut of 
mud beside the ruinous palace of his fathers, whilst the 
country has sunk for centuries to the level which prophecy 
assigned it, of " the basest of kingdoms." Contrast the pages 
of ancient history and their picture of Babylon as she was in 
her days of conquest, and the pages of modern travel and 
their picture of Babylon as she is, " swept with the besom 

* Gen. xlix. 7. 



AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 381 

of desolation." Look at the Persian as he was, and the Per- 
sian as he is ; the valorous and terrible Turk of other cen- 
turies, and the effete and dependent Turk of our times. See 
the memorials of the far-travelled and victorious legions of 
ancient Rome in the days of her republican might and her 
imperial pride — then turn to trace, if you can, the features 
of that terrible nation, who so excelled and so delighted in 
war, in the effeminate, treacherous and vindictive Italian, 
who has passion without power, and feeling without princi- 
ple, his animal sensibilities, as nurtured amid the nudities 
of exquisite statuary and matchless painting to a refined 
delicacy of taste, educated until they have outgrown the 
moral, and left behind no delicacy whatever of moral feel- 
ings. Their Virgil boasted once, in the days of warlike 
power, that other people might better carve and better paint, 
but Romans were born to rule. The curse of Providence 
on the mad love of military rapine has inverted the boast 
of their poet. The modern Roman carves and paints, but 
rule he cannot, himself or others. The bayonets of Austria 
govern him, and the Swiss mercenaries are the guards of his 
Pontiff. The assassin has replaced the warrior, the fiddler 
the statesman, and for the severe virtue of her Cato and the 
simple patriotism of her Cincinnatus, you see a nation with- 
out conscience, without dignity, and without power, getting 
up melo-dramatic conspiracies and sanguinary outbreaks, but 
without the pith and manhood to recover their freedom.* 
They who delighted in war, how are they scattered, al- 
though the arches and the pillars yet stand that tell of their 
old manhood, and enterprise, and renown ; and under the 
shadow of Trajan's column and the arch of Titus clamors 
Ihe mendicant and lurks the assassin. The old Sclavi, once 
a formidable people, whose name in their own language sig- 
nified "glory," were at first terrible in their brave, fierce 
invasions, but became in their time and turn vanquished and 
captives ; and now their national name is in our own and 
several European languages the term to describe the bond- 
man, the man not only who has lost peace, but who has lost 
freedom also. Yes, our very word " slave" is a standing 
memorial of the great retributive law of our text — " The 
scatterer scattered," the prowler preyed upon, the troubler 



* Written in 1847, and ere the struggles of 1849 had developed 3 in the char- 
acter of some of the Italians, new and nobler elements. 



382 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 

caught in the pitfall he has dug. So, turn to the European 
ancestors of the race with whom is waged our present con- 
test. So, see Spain, once the mightiest and bravest nation 
of Europe, now at home poor, though her universal exche- 
quer once was gorged with the wealth of both the Indies ; 
and in her colonies, once the scene of the valor of a Pizarro 
and a Cortez, see her race now how spent and abject. In 
times nearer our own, how dreadfully were the invasions of 
Revolutionary and Imperial France requited in her own cap- 
ital twice entered by an enemy, and in the fate of her own 
great Captain, coming at first, as it was predicted of Cyrus, 
" upon princes as upon mortar, and as the potter treadeth 
clay," afterwards fretting himself to death within the circuit 
of his narrow island prison — how did God seem reading a 
fresh comment for a new and forgetful generation, on this 
old and forgotten law of his Providence. 

3. If it be asked, Why is this so ? we answer, Because 
God wills it ; and because also, from the very nature of war 
and of man's mind and heart, such must be the ultimate 
results even of successful war, on those who delight in it, as 
a gainful trade and a pleasant recreation. It inflates pride, 
and Earth and Heaven delight in abasing pride. It fosters 
a spirit of reckless violence and aggression, that must ulti- 
mately provoke an opposition too strong and general to be 
surmounted, and a revenge that will spare no humiliation of 
its old oppressor. It undermines quiet industry and self- 
reliance to substitute gains that, though large and easily 
won, yet, like those of the robber, are soon wasted and little 
satisfactory while possessed. It sets up in the nation a 
false standard of honor, and the strong will that makes its 
passions triumph over other men's wills, is counted great, 
rather than the magnanimity that bows its own and other 
men's passions to the simple, silent majesty of the laws. 
Seldom, therefore, has liberty or law long stood before mili- 
tary glory and power. The secret of military success is, 
again, unreflecting, implicit submission to the leader's will. 
The secret of permanent liberty is the trial of the leader's 
will by the general conscience and reason of the people. 
Jesuitism organized its terrible compactness, its lithe and 
mighty unity, by the adoption of military principles of im- 
plicit and entire submission. Its founder was a soldier, and 
brought to his task military reminiscences. But as con- 
science was crushed under the law of obedience by that 



AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 383 

system, so is it in its measure in all other systems of power 
and grandeur, built upon the warlike basis. Our country 
and its institutions, if preserved in their original entireness 
and purity, need the education and development, not the 
suppression and extinction of the national conscience. And 
war and its military training go to strain and break that 
conscience, instead of training it. 

4. God has set before us as a people a magnificent task. 
To unite in the bonds of a common piety and freedom the 
various people from whom our colonists are drawn ; to prove 
to less free nations in the old world, how with popular free- 
dom may consist popular self-restraint, and how they who 
rule themselves may be a law-abiding and God-fearing peo- 
ple ; — this is the labor and the prize set before us. But if 
we become a rapacious and unscrupulous nation, scornful 
of laws, aggressive and unjust, we travesty our own most 
solemn professions, we aid the cause of despotism in the 
Eastern world, and prepare the path and the necessity for 
the rise of a military despotism among ourselves on these 
Western shores. God is not mocked by republics more 
safely than by churches, by statesmen than by religionists. 
The unjust cannot long be free, the violent are never event- 
ually safe. 

Thus have we wished to bring out of our text the great 
lessons it teaches. We have sought to show that war is not 
in all circumstances unlawful even under the gospel, but 
that it is, yet, always a calamity, and generally an enormous 
crime. We have sought to show how delighting in war was 
sinful, and what the classes were thus guilty. We have seen 
how, in ancient and modern history, God has governed the 
world on the principle which the prayer of our text invokes. 

We have sought to shun all needless and controversial 
details. It is not long since the leaders of the two great and 
rival parties of the nation united in declaring that the an- 
nexation of Texas would involve our Union in a war. The 
friends of the measure of annexation denied this. The 
province was annexed. The war has ensued. 

Is it our duty to raise the cry in such circumstances, " Our 
country, right or wrong?" In the days of the Commonwealth 
and Protectorate, Blake, a religious man, the brave English 
admiral who first began the long course of England's naval 
triumphs, did not in all things fully sympathize with the 
ruling powers at home. But he was accustomed to say that 



384 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 

the seaman must leave the powers at home to settle the 
affairs of the nation — it was his business to see that foreign- 
ers did not wrong the country abroad. Now, if the wars 
abroad were not unjust (and such they were not), we sup- 
pose the principle that good and brave man announced as 
his rule not an untenable one. But to a distinguished naval 
warrior of our own country is assigned a sentiment more 
sweeping, often quoted and highly lauded, " Our country, 
right or wrong" Now, there may be questions as to right 
and wrong in the policy and course of a country, where 
good men and able are nearly equally divided. A man in 
doubt, after his own best efforts to decide the question, 
may, perhaps, safely leave such difficult and intricate ques- 
tions to others, and do the work of his station. But a 
man, who, after the first investigation, believes clearly his 
country engaged in a wrong course, may and should, by all 
proper means, protest against the wrong-doing, not only for 
his own sake, and to clear his own soul, but for the benefit 
of his country. God's right over man is older than that of 
the country or the family even. If this principle on which 
we comment were true in morals and patriotism — if our 
country, irrespective of the justice of her claims, should be 
sustained — then in those countries whose government is des- 
potic, and where the king says virtually, like the royal Bour- 
bon, "I am the State" — this maxim, "the country right 
or wrong," is tantamount to saying, Let the will of the 
prince, whether vicious or good, be my supreme law. And 
if that will not only justifies but demands my obedience 
as a patriot — if to be true to her and her government, I 
must close my eyes and leave conscience in abeyance — then 
the elders of Jezreel were blameless before God for obey- 
ing the signet of Ahab and the letter of Jezebel, and shed- 
ding the innocent blood of Naboth to obtain the confisca- 
tion of his vineyard. Then John was a traitor for not leav- 
ing uncensured the domestic relations of his sovereign He- 
rod. Then the inhabitants of Madagascar are bound, by our 
laws of patriotism, since such is their queen's will, to perse- 
cute in our days Christians to the death. 

If, as some wish, all discussion were treasonable, soon as a 
war had been provoked, no matter how regularly and how 
justly, or how irregularly and how unjustly ; and if thence- 
forward to discuss its origin and character were unlawful, it 
were virtually a proclamation of martial law over the land 



AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 385 

— it were the enunciation by political power of a pontifical 
interdict upon the nation's conscience, forbidding, as did the 
rash edict of Darius the Mede, all prayer to God, as a Judge,' 
till the quarrel were ended. The patriotism of Daniel was 
best shown, by refusing calmly to abide any such interdict, 
usurping on the rights alike of conscience, and of the Lord 
of conscience. No, our country — be her sovereign one or her 
rulers many, be she a democracy or a despotism — our coun- 
try and its government may never dispense us from oui 
primary allegiance to God's eternal and immutable law of 
right. No, as we love God and fear his anger, let right stand 
ever before either country or home. God and right are to 
the truly religious man, the patriot of scriptural principles, 
dearer than his country. So Jeremiah loved his country, 
and sacrificed popularity and perilled life, in counselling Zed- 
ekiah and his nobles against a war that began by the break- 
ing of a solemn treaty. Or rather, the enlightened believer 
knows that his country can be safe but as brought right ; and 
loves her true and permanent interests too well, to wish her 
transient, and deceptive, and ruinous success, in a course of. 
wrong-doing. ' 

Much is said of the destinies of the Anglo-Saxon race, and 
of their irresistible development. May our God make that de- 
velopment in science and art, in integrity and influence, more 
than its loudest eulogist has dared to promise. But a slight 
glance at the past history of the world suffices to discover, 
that in races as in individuals, pride goeth before destruc- 
tion, and is the first symptom of internal decay in the power 
of which it vaunts. The core and pith of a nation's manhood 
soon becomes rotten, when the outer rind and enamel of its 
conscience and self-control and honesty scales off. And 
when men claim, in the development of their talents and 
might, to go beyond God's ordinary law of morals, God is 
accustomed to transcend His ordinary laws of Providence 
for their punishment. The antediluvian and gigantic races 
of the old world arrogated to themselves to transcend vulgar 
laws of justice and religion; and God, to meet with condign 
retribution their hardihood, gave to Nature to develope laws 
and powers before unknown. The cisterns of heaven and the 
fountains of the great deep were allowed to break their old 
statutes, and spurn their original restraints, and the deluge 
came to assert the supremacy of Right over Might. Mon- 
strosities of crime provoke miracles of vengeance. These 

50 



386 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 

may come from quarters remote and opposite to those whence 
clanger alone was dreaded. But come when it may or whence 
it may, it must come ultimately, and come the heavier from 
the delay in its movements and the distance it has traversed — 
an avalanche that has gathered in mass every moment it 
lingered, and every fathom it travelled of the wide interval. 

The man or the people would be far out of their course, 
who should claim a development that had outgrown the 
Decalogue as God's own voice proclaimed it on Sinai, and 
who should boast of a patent to possess the earth by virtue 
of a physical and mental superiority that reverses, in their 
case, the eighth and tenth commandments, and converts the 
prohibition into a charter, which says, in effect, to them, 
" Thou shalt covet (because of his inferior numbers and cul- 
ture, his lower grade of piety and powers) thy neighbor's 
possessions ;" and " Thou shalt steal (because of his wretched 
misgovernment) thy neighbor's land." Jehovah never re- 
cognized the right, either of an infallible pontiff or of a sov- 
ereign people, to proclaim a dispensation from the obligations 
of his immutable statutes, by the development of their pow- 
ers or because of their national greatness. 

There is no successful warring against the Lord of Hosts. 
His will is Fate, his might the quiet irresistibility of Omnip- 
otence. Neither nations nor individuals can contend with 
Him. And now, dismissing all questions of social interest, 
let us individually inquire, whether we are serving or rebel- 
ling against Him ? Look round the scarred and ruinous 
earth : look up to heaven spoiled of Lucifer and the host 
whom he trailed after him, partners of his revolt and fall. 
Look to the hell where he writhes. See his conflicts with 
Christ in the days of His incarnation. See the Church of 
God often assailed, but the gates of hell not prevailing. 
Look to sinners on their death-beds. Look into your own 
consciences, in your more sober and wiser hours, and see, 
my fellow-sinners, if it be safe to war and to delight in war- 
ring against a Holy and Almighty God ? Then think of 
the treachery and ingratitude of fighting a friend, a Deliver- 
er, and see what reasons you can find for beginning another 
year with a continued quarrel against the Lord Jesus Christ, 
the Saviour, who bought you with His own blood? If you 
war against the redeeming cross, will not, must not the Last 
Judgment scatter your hopes for ever, and hurl your souls 
into endless perdition ? 






AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 387 

The universe is one great battle-field. The founder of 
the Jesuit order wisely and truly represented all mankind as 
making up but two great camps, the one under the banners 
of Satan the Destroyer, the other grouped around the stand- 
ard of Christ the Redeemer. There is no debatable ground 
between the hosts. No neutrality is possible in this war. 
He that gathereth not with Christ scattereth abroad, and 
shall himself be scattered in the sifting blasts of the Last 
Judgment. He that is not with us is against us. With 
whom, then, are you choosing your sides ? Each new year, 
each pause in the procession to eternity, each stile you cross, 
and each milestone along the highway and in the pilgrimage 
of life, invites you to review your march and inquire your 
prospects. Are you still bent on rejecting Christ, and re- 
sisting God and defying heaven ? How mad the war you wage ; 
it is one of disinheriting for yourself, — of expatriation, endless 
and hopeless, from the heavenly mansion and home. Against 
you are angels, and saints, and God, and all holy beings, 
the prayers of the Church, and the statutes of Omnipotence. 
With you are the wicked, and the lawless, and the abomina- 
ble, earth's burden now, and soon to be the fuel of the pit. 
O, why fight for death, and for damnation, and for endless 
despair ? 



388 THE CAGOTS OF FRANCE. 



APPENDIX. 



THE CAGOTS OF FRANCE. 

From the travels, which, under the assumed name of Derwent Conway, 
and with the title of " Switzerland, the South of France, and the Pyrenees, 
in mdcccxxx," were issued in Constable's Miscellany, as volumes lxvi. and 
lxvii., of that work, by R. D. Inglis, Esq., a lineal descendant, we believe, Df 
the excellent Col. Gardiner, we take the following extract, relative to this 
peculiar race. Inglis published, under his own name, several volumes of tra- 
vels, marked with much acuteness of observation, strong sense, and felici- 
tous description. 

"In speaking of the inhabitants of the Pyrenees, I must not overlook that 
extraordinary race, which has baffled the historian in his vain endeavors to 
account for its origin, and which has furnished matter of interest both to the 
novelist and the traveller. It is probable, that many readers of this volume 
may never have heard of the Cagots, and that others may know only of the 
existence of such a race ; and although, in presenting some details respecting 
this extraordinary people, I disclaim any pretension to novelty or original 
elucidation, yet, having travelled among their valleys, and seen their huts 
and themselves, I feel that it would be an unpardonable omission, were I to 
omit availing myself of even the common sources of information, in order 
that I may include, in this volume, a short account of the Cagots. 

"The Cagots are found in several of the more secluded valleys of the 
Pyrenees, particularly in the lateral valleys that branch from the valley of 
Bareges, Luchon, and Aure. So sedulously do the Cagots keep apart from 
the rest of their fellow-men, that one might travel through the Pyrenees 
without seeing an individual of the race, unless inquiry were specially direct- 
ed towards them. It was not until I expressed a desire to the guide who at- 
tended me in my excursions from St. Sauveur, to see one of the race of Ca- 
gots, that my curiosity was gratified. This was in one of the lateral valleys 
that runs to the right, between Bareges and the Tourmalet, a valley traversed 
by no road, and which only leads to the lac d? escaibous. The Cagot is known 
by his sallow and unhealthy countenance — his expression of stupidity — his 
want of vigor, and relaxed appearance — his imperfect articulation — and, in 
many cases, his disposition to goitres. If we were to credit the assertion of 
the novelist, we should reject one of these characteristics, or at least say, that 
the stupidity of the Cagot is only apparent. It is possible, that a knowledge of 
his degraded condition, and the contempt, if not aversion, with which he is 
regarded, as well as the total seclusion in which the family of the Cagot lives, 
may have their effect in impressing upon his countenance an expression of 
humility, distrust, and timidity, that might be mistaken for intellectual defi- 
ciency. But the observation of all those who have studied with the greatest 
advantages the peculiarities of this race, concur in allotting to the Cagot an 
inferior share of mental capacity. 

"The days of Cagol persecution have passed away ; but tradition has pre- 
served a recollection of the degradation and sufferings of the race, and has 



THE CAGOTS OF FRANCE. 389 

even, in some small degree, handed down, along with the history of these 
persecutions, some vestiges of the prejudices which gave rise to it. From 
time immemorial, the Cagot families have inhabited the most retired valleys, 
and the most miserable habitations. The race has always been regarded as 
infamous, and the individuals of it outcasts from the family of mankind. 
They were excluded from all rights of citizens ; they were not permitted to 
have arms, or to exercise any other trade than that of wood-cutters : and, in 
more remote times, they were obliged to bear upon their breast a red mark, 
the sign of their degradation. So far, indeed, was aversion towards this un- 
fortunate people carried, that they entered the churches by a separate door, 
and occupied seats allotted to the rejected caste. The persecutions have long 
ceased ; and time and its attendant improvements have diminished the pre- 
judices, and weakened the feelings of aversion with which they were formerly 
regarded. But they are still the race of Cagots — still a separate family — still 
outcasts — still a people who are evidently no kindred of those who live around 
them, but the remnant of a different and more ancient family. 

"It is impossible for the traveller, still less the philosopher, to know of the 
existence of this caste, without endeavoring to pierce the clouds that hang 
over its origin, and the causes of its persecution. But it is at least doubtful, 
whether any of these inquiries have thrown true light upon the subject. 
History, indeed, records the peculiar persecutions of which they were the 
subjects ; and proves, that these persecutions, pursuing a despised and hated 
race, were directed against the same people, whether found in Brittany, La 
Vendee, Auvergne, or the Pyrenees. We find the Parliament of Rennes in- 
terfering in their favor, to obtain them the right of sepulture. In the elev- 
enth century, we find the Cagots of Beam disposed of by testament as slaves. 
The priests would not admit them to confession ; and, by an ancient act of 
Beam, it was resolved that the testimony of seven of them should be equiva- 
lent to the evidence of one free citizen ; and even so late as the fifteenth cen- 
tury, they were forbidden to walk the streets barefooted, in case of infection 
being communicated to the stones ; and upon their clothes was impressed 
the foot of a goose. Yet all these marks of .hatred are unaccounted for. No 
record has descended to us, by which the cause of this persecution may be 
explained ; and we are left to guess at the origin of that reprobation which 
has followed this reje-cted people from the earliest times, and in whatever 
country they have been found. 

"M. Ramond, in his disquisition upon this subject, says, 'The Cagots of 
all France have a common origin. The same event has confined them all 
in the most remote and desert spots ; and, whatever this event may be, it 
must be such as will account for every thing— it must be great and general — 
must have impressed at once upon the whole of France the same sentiments 
of hatred — have marked its victims with the seal of the same reprobation — 
and have disgraced the race, and all its subdivisions, with the opprobrium of 
a name which every where awakened the same ideas of horror and con- 
tempt.' This is just reasoning; but we are as far as ever from the event 
which has fixed hatred and opprobrium upon the dispersed race of Cagots. 
Some have held, that they are descendants of lepers, and, as such, exiled 
from the society of others ; but to this, M. Ramond replies, that although 
lepers have been exiled or confined, there is no record of their having ever 
been sold or disposed of by testament. Others have contended, that the Ca- 
gots are the descendants of the ancient Gauls, brought into a state of slavery 
by the people who drove out the Romans ; but to this hypothesis, also, M. 
Ramond answers, that under the dominion of the Goths, the Gaul and the 
Roman were never reduced to a state of slavery ; and he rightly adds, that 
the tyranny merely of a conqueror enslaving the vanquished, would not ac- 
count for the origin of the Cagot ; because the feeling with which the Cagot 
has been regarded, has not been merely that of .contempt, but of aversion, and 
even horror. But the explanation attempted by M. Ramond seems to me 



390 THE CAGOTS OF FRANCE. 

to be alike inefficient to explain the origin of this hatred and persecution. 
He says, ' Such victory as may have terminated the conflict of two nations 
equally ferocious and inflamed against each other by. a long train of rivalry 
■ — the invasion of one barbarian punished by another barbarian — the reaction 
of the oppressed against the oppressor — at last completely disarmed — bloody 
combats — disastrous defeats — such only could have been the sources of the 
hatred and fury which could have given rise to miseries like those which we 
behold.' But it appears to me, that such events as M. Ramond supposes, 
would lead only to oppression, and perhaps slavery, but not to aversion or 
horror ; and that even the deadliest feelings of hatred, engendered from such 
causes, would not have outlived the generation which first imbibed them. 
But even the explanation of M. Ramond, if satisfactory, would still leave the 
origin of Cagots and Cagot persecution as dark as ever ; for, among the nu- 
merous hordes of barbarians who pushed one another from their conquests, 
and among the endless and confused strife of battles which destroyed, min- 
gled, and separated the different races, how can we determine, whether 
Alans, or Suevi, or Vandals, or Huns, or Goths, or Francs, or Moors, or 
Saracens, were that peculiar race, whose remnant has descended to these 
days with the mark of persecution and hatred stamped upon it 1 

"It would prove to most readers an uninteresting detail, were I to go over 
the arguments of M. de Gebelin, who contends that the Cagots are the re- 
mains of the Alans ; or of M. Ramond, who believes them to be a remnant 
of the Goths. Nothing approaching to certainty, -scarcely even bordering 
upon probability, appears in the reasoning of either. The Cagots may have 
been Alans, or they may have been Goths; but there seems to be nearly the 
same reason for believing them the remnant of the one as of the other people. 
If this miserable and proscribed race should, indeed, be all that remains 
of the Gothic conquerors of half the world, what a lesson for pride is there ! 

" I cannot conclude this hasty sketch better than in the words of M. Ra- 
mond, who, whatever his philosophical powers may be, is evidently a kind- 
hearted and an observing man, and who possessed the best of all opportuni- 
ties forjudging of the people which were the object of his inquiry. 

" 1 1 have seen,' says he, ' some families of these unfortunate creatures. 
They are gradually approaching the villages from which prejudice has ban- 
ished them. The side-doors by which they were formerly obliged to enter 
the churches are useless (M. Ramond might have said shut up, for so they 
are in general), and some degree of pity mingles, at length, with the contempt 
and aversion which they formerly inspired ; yet I have been in some of 
their retreats, where they still fear the insults of prejudice, and await the- 
visits of the compassionate. I have found among them the poorest be- 
ings perhaps that exist upon the face of the earth. I have met with brothers, 
who loved each other with that tenderness which is the most pressing want 
of isolated men. I have seen among them women, whose affection had a 
somewhat in it of that submission and devotion which are inspired by feeble- 
ness and misfortune. And never, in this half annihilation of those beings of 
my species, could I recognize, without shuddering, the extent of the power 
which we may exercise over the existence of our fellow — the narrow circle 
of knowledge and of enjoyment within which we may confine him— the 
smallness of the sphere to which we may reduce his usefulness.' " — Consta- 
bles Miscellany, vol. lxvii., pp. 123 — 134. 

The Breton antiquarians, who find in their own portion of France the 
same race, have seemed inclined to trace them no farther back than to the 
lepers of the media3val times, victims as they suppose of a disease brought 
back into Europe by the Crusaders. But the allusions to this remarkable 
people run back to a far earlier era than that of the first crusade. Michelet. 
the historian, leaves undetermined (he origin of these " Pariahs of the West," 
as he calls them. The recent erudite and elaborate work of F. Michel, (His- 
toire des Races Maudites de la France etde l'Espagne. Paris, 1847, 2 tomes,) 



THE CAGOTS OF FRANCE. 391 

who has devoted the first volume of his treatise to the Cagots, accepts, in 
the main, as true, the ancient tradition that they are chiefly, though not ex- 
clusively, descendants of the Goths, and sustains the derivation of the name 
supported by Scaliger, Canis Gothics, (or that, in token of the popular hate 
and scorn, they were styled Dogs of Goths,) (Michel, I. 355.) He assigns as 
the era of their settlement in southern France, the disastrous return of Char- 
lemagne, from his expedition into Spain, about the close of the eighth cen- 
tury, when the residents of Spain, Gothic and Arabian, who had adhered to 
hisbanners, sought, on his retreat, safety from their Moorish masters, by re- 
tiring into Charlemagne's dominions, though meeting there the hereditary and 
invincible dislike of his earlier subjects already settled in the regions where 
he fixed these new colonists. The work of Michel furnishes the most cu- 
rious details, as to the popular enmity, and social disadvantages, and en- 
venomed contempt, of which the Cagots were for ten centuries the victims ; 
their advent into France, according to his theory, going back to the times of 
the battle of Roncesvalles, so celebrated in the fables of chivalry, when Ro- 
land, the nephew of Charlemagne, and the Orlando of mediaeval romance, 
perished, in fighting the Saracens. 



